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ON THE 



Reunion of the Churches 



.. 

By JOHN J? 1. VON DOLLINGER, D.D., D.CL. 

PROFESSOR OF ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF MUNICH, 
PROVOST OF THE CHAPEL-ROYAL, ETC., ETC. ' 



TRANSLATED WITH PREFACE 
By HENRY NUTCOMBE OXENHAM, M.A. 

LATE SCHOLAR OF BALLIOL COLLEGE, OXFORD. 



' Et ingressus est in ea spiritus, et vixerunt; steteruntque super pedes suos exercitus grandis 
nimis valde. Et dixit ad )ne ; Eili hominis, ossa ha>c unwersa domus Israel est. 1 



few fork 

Pott, Young & Co 

1872. 



■A 






%o the 
Eev. HENEY PAEEY LIDDON, D.D., D.C.L. 

IRELAND PROFESSOR OF EXEGESIS IN THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD, 
CANON OF ST. PAUL'S. 



My deae Liddon, 

You will readily believe that there 
are many reasons why I should gladly seize the oppor- 
tunity of dedicating this volume to you, but it will be 
sufficient to mention two. In the first place, it has 
long been my wish to put on record some acknowledg- 
ment of a friendship which has now lasted nearly 
twenty-five years, dating from my first undergraduate 
term at Oxford, and which has been to me the source 
of so much happiness and so many blessings. Yet 
what could I hope to offer of my own that would be at 
all worthy of your acceptance ? Here, however, where 
for the most part the language alone is mine, and the 
thoughts are those of one whom we have both learned 



vi Dedication. 

to love and reverence, is something which I may not 
unfitly present and you need not hesitate to accept. 
And then, again, I would ask you to welcome this 
Dedication, as a little souvenir of the pleasant and 
profitable hours we spent together last year at Munich 
in the company of the illustrious author. 

Wishing you every blessing, and praying that you 
may long be spared with health and strength to labour 
in your place for those sacred interests, so dear to 
both of us, to which Dr. Dollinger has here devoted 
the ripe wisdom of his maturest reflections, 

I am ever, my dear Liddon, 

Most affectionately yours, 

H. K OXENHAM. 

Nativity of our Lady, 1872. 



CONTENTS. 



PAGE 

Preface, ....... ix 



LECTURE I. 

General Review of the Religious Condition of the 

World, ...... 1 

LECTURE II. 

The Duty of Christian Nations to the. Heathen, and 

its Great Hindrance, . . . . 20 

LECTURE III. 
Division of East and West : Grounds of Hope, . 32 

LECTURE IV. 
The German Reformation, .... 60 

LECTURE V. 

Reaction towards Union on the Continent in the 

Seventeenth Century, .... 84 



viii Contents. 



LECTURE VI. 

PAGE 

The English Reformation, its Nature and Results, . 103 



LECTURE VII. 

Difficulties and Grounds of Hope, . . . 136 



PRE FA CE. 



QJOME apology is due to the public both for the 
^ delay in the appearance of this work, and for 
the form in which it is now presented to them. The 
Lectures here translated were delivered by Dr. Dollinger 
in the Great Hall of the Museum at Munich, on Friday 
evenings, during the months of February and March 
last; but it was his intention to revise and enlarge 
them considerably before publication, and he had 
kindly promised to send me the sheets for translation, 
as they were successively printed off. But meanwhile 
the execution of this design has been delayed beyond 
his expectation by the pressure of other engagements, 
and he therefore afterwards offered to supply me with 
the manuscript of the Lectures, as originally delivered, 
from which the present translation has been made. I 
shall, of course, hereafter avail myself of the complete 
work on its appearance in Germany, should occasion 



x Preface. 

arise for doing so. It is right to add that none of the 
reports of the course which appeared in the principal 
German newspapers, and were wholly or partially 
reproduced in some of our own, were published with 
the author's sanction, and that he disclaims all 
responsibility for them. The actual text differs in 
many respects from the report in the Allgemeine 
Zeitung. This is accordingly the first appearance of 
the Lectures, either in Germany or in England, in an 
authentic form. Some notes and references the author 
has himself added to the manuscript. For all bracketed 
notes I am alone responsible. They are for the most 
part simply designed to provide illustrative details of 
information, which may not always be familiar to the 
general reader. 

The momentous question which Dr. Dollinger has 
here undertaken to discuss, and to which indeed he 
has again and again called attention in several of his 
previous works, is one that has long been forcing itself 
on the thoughts of serious men in all parts of our 
divided Christendom. Some testimonies to the wide- 
spread and growing sense of its importance have been 
collected, as well from Catholic as from Anglican writers, 
in a former work of mine on the subject, and the evi- 



Preface. xi 

dence might be indefinitely multiplied. 1 Within the 
last few years only, to such names as Wiseman, Ketteler, 
and Dupanloup have been added those of men differing 
as widely in many respects both from them and from 
each other, as Maret, G-ratry, Perreyve, Michaud, 
Strossmayer, and the martyred Darboy. Nor is the 
feeling, as will be seen from these Lectures, confined to 
one side only. It is shared also by Lutheran as well 
as Anglican divines, though probably not as yet to the 
same extent by the former. 2 

We cannot wonder that it should be so. The direct 
contradiction to the will and purpose of our divine 
Lord, revealed in the religious divisions of His professed 
disciples, would of course alone be a more than sufficient 
motive for making every exertion to put an end to a 
state of things so displeasing to Him. But over and 
above this, the overwhelming practical interest of the 
question is impressing, I might say obtruding, itself 

1 See Appendix to my Letter to F. Lockhart on Dr. Pusey's Eirenicon, 
2d ed., Washbourne, 1872. 

2 See, e.g., some remarkable letters addressed by several Protestant 
pastors to Bisbop Martin of Paderborn, urging bim to nse his influence for 
the removal of what they allege to be the two chief hindrances to a reunion 
of the separated Churches, viz., the compulsory celibacy of the clergy and 
the withdrawal of the chalice from the people. The letters are given in 
the second appendix to Friedrich's Tagebuch wahrend des Vat. Concils } 
pp. 424 sqq. 



xii Preface. 

more prominently every day on the notice even of the 
most superficial observers of the existing phenomena, 
whether of the Christian or the Heathen world. On 
the latter point nothing need be added here to what has 
been so fully set forth by the lecturer. The single fact 
that, at the end of eighteen centuries, some 800,000,000 
of our fellow-men — considerably over two-thirds of the 
human race — are still strangers to any form of Chris- 
tianity, speaks volumes. And it is not the less, but 
the more significant, when we call to mind the large 
and generous efforts which have been made for their 
conversion during the last three centuries, — the im- 
mense expenditure of English gold with such absurdly 
disproportionate results, and the heroic labours of 
Catholic missionaries, who have shed their blood like 
water on almost every shore, and yet have gathered in 
but a precarious harvest of souls, counted by hundreds 
or thousands, when the millions of heathendom should 
long since have become obedient to the faith. It was 
not thus when Apostles preached, when Augustine, or 
Boniface, or Columba went forth to win whole nations 
to the Gospel. And why not ? They taught a " com- 
mon Christianity " in a very different sense from that 
now attached to the phrase, and the world, beholding 



Preface. xiii 

their unity, believed in Him who sent them. But the 
rival preachers of a score of jarring creeds the world 
cannot believe in; and for the most part it cuts the 
knot by rejecting all alike. We were warned before- 
hand that it must be so. 

I will but add the eloquent testimony of Bishop 
Maret on this point : " If, after eighteen centuries, 
idolatry prevails over the greater part of the globe ; 
if Mahometism desolates once flourishing Christian 
countries; if a thinly disguised atheism ravages even 
the Christian world, — -doubt not that one of the most 
powerful causes of so many moral and social miseries, 
so many shameful humiliations, lies in the many 
unhappy internal divisions of Christians, which con- 
stitute schism and heresy. If the Eastern Churches 
were reunited to the Mother Church, if our brethren, 
separated from unity by the violent revolutions of the 
sixteenth century, were reunited with us, what a new 
power of transformation and victory would Christi- 
anity display in the world, combining in one all its 
living forces, all the elements of regenerated progress, 
science, and civilisation. Then indeed should we wit- 
ness the reign of God and of His Christ on earth. 
Everything which can hinder the drawing together 



xiv Preface. 

again of hearts and minds, and the restoration of 
religious unity, should be regarded as the greatest of 
evils, because it is what hinders the greatest of bless- 
ings." 1 

And if we turn our glance on the Christian world, the 
portentous results of disunion stare us yet more visibly 
in the face. Scepticism manifests its presence daily 
and hourly among us in a thousand open or insidious 
forms. It colours our literature, it controls our policy, 
it mounts our pulpits, it aspires to restrain or to for- 
mulate our prayers. And how do the champions of 
orthodoxy essay to meet it ? By ingenious arguments, 
which perhaps only half convince themselves ; by 
stammering appeals to an undefined authority; or by the 
worn-out sophisms of " the Bible and the Bible only " 
theory, as though the world could stand on the tortoise, 
and the tortoise stand upon space. But this will not 
avail. Protestantism, as a system of positive belief, is 
found to be unequal to the crisis. 2 If I refer to the 
independent witness of a recent writer in the West- 

1 Bu Concile General, vol. ii. pp. 387, 8. 

2 It is a fact abundantly proved by statistics that religious perplexity is 
one main cause of the large increase of insanity in modern times, as also 
that suicide is more common in Protestant than in Catholic countries. — 
See Casper's DenkvMrdigheiten zur median. Statistik, quoted in Buckle's 
History of Civilisation, vol. i. p. 26. 



Preface. xv 

minster Review, it is not for any novelty in his argument 
— for it has often been urged before — still less from 
any sympathy with his tone, even where I am able to 
agree with him ; but simply because he has denned the 
situation from the infidel point of view with edifying 
candour and precision. 1 

Catholicism, he begins by assuring us, is destined to 
outlive Protestantism, as well because " its promises are 
more satisfactory to the instincts of the vulgar" — that 
is, because it better satisfies the religious cravings of 
the human soul — as from its resting on a more philo- 
sophical basis. He is reviewing Dr. Newman's recent 
reprint of the 85 th of the Tracts for the Times, vindi- 
cating the claims of historical as opposed to what is 
sometimes called Bible Christianity, and he fully admits 
the force of the argument. He thinks it certain that 
" at the date of the publication of the fourth Gospel, 
or very shortly afterwards," which can hardly mean 
later than the second century, the teaching of the 
Church was distinctively Catholic, and reminds us that 
the earliest authorities cited for the canon of Scripture 
are equally emphatic in asserting, e.g., the doctrines of 
the Eucharistic sacrifice and prayer for the dead. He 

1 West. Rev. for July 1872 : Art. " Difficulties of Protestantism." 



xvi Preface. 

is naturally not sanguine as to the future spread of 
Christianity, and refers for his own purposes to the 
comparative failure, which was noticed just now, of 
modem missionary efforts. But he is quite convinced 
that, wherever it does spread, it will not be in the form 
of Protestantism. Indeed, he goes so far as to express 
an opinion that, " speaking broadly, it is impossible 
now-a-days to convert any one to" a system, which 
cannot elicit faith, for it is in fact simply " an arrested 
development of free thought," and is already writhing 
uneasily under the artificial fetters imposed on it at the 
Eeformation. It is incapable from its nature of forming 
a permanent dwelling-place for the mind, but has done 
good service as a temporary resting-place, " which has 
happily sheltered man on his way from bondage to 
freedom, from darkness to light, from theology to Truth." 
In other words, it has served to break, and thereby 
to disguise, the fall from Christian faith into naked 
infidelity. The reviewer urges in conclusion, what is 
obvious, that the final issue must turn on the admis- 
sion or denial of the supernatural in any form ; and 
he might have added that premonitory signs are already 
discernible of the approach of the contest, if it is not 
actually begun. That the contending forces will be 



Preface. xvii 

eventually driven by the conditions of the conflict to 
range themselves in two, and two only, camps, under 
the rival banners of faith or of unbelief, there cannot 
be a doubt, and as little that such a crisis would 
involve "not only the eclipse, but the disappearance 
of the system known as Protestantism," through the 
absorption of its positive and negative elements into 
the opposite systems to which they respectively belong. 
There are two reasons just now for insisting on this 
aspect of the case, and which have led me to dwell, at 
greater length than its intrinsic merits would require, 
on the article in the 'Westminster Review. In the first 
place, it is well that religious Protestants should bring 
themselves to understand distinctly — and I use the 
term, " Protestant," for all who rest their belief on the 
Protestant principle of private judgment, as distinct 
from the traditional and historical basis of Catholic 
Christianity — on how insecure a tenure they hold those 
portions of revealed truth which they are sincerely 
anxious to retain, and how signal must be their dis- 
comfiture, if they elect to stand alone against the 
advancing forces of unbelief. 1 It should be borne in 

1 A studiously vague and general assertion of the supernatural element 
in religion was only carried by a majority of 61 to 46 last June in the 
Synod of the French Protestant Church, after a prolonged and stormy 

b 



xviii Preface. 

mind that Protestantism, when left to itself, has always 
betrayed an inherent tendency to gravitate towards 
Socinianism. This has been abundantly illustrated in 
the Eeformed Churches of Germany and Switzerland, 
while a case tried before the English law courts some 
forty years ago brought out the startling fact, that 
almost the entire Presbyterian body in this country 
had abandoned the fundamental tenet which discrimi- 
nates Christianity from natural religion. 1 

And it is surely not a little significant in this 
connexion that, in the vital controversy now agitating 
the Established Church, the Evangelical party, whose 
theological culture has never been their strong point, 
should have openly and somewhat eagerly joined the 
ugly rush against that majestic and venerable formu- 
lary which most effectively guards the central verity of 
revelation. The circumstance is the more remarkable, 
because the Athanasian Creed touches on no single 
doctrine which they do not, equally with their High 
Church and Ritualist rivals, profess to believe. And 
it would be the merest excess, not of charity, but of 
unreason, to affect to doubt that, with the great majo- 

debate of several days' duration. It contains no distinct assertion of the 
divinity of Christ. 
1 The case of Lady Hewley's Charity, in 1832. 



Preface. xix 

rity of the assailing party, the real ground of antagonism 
lies in a disbelief, more or less consciously acknowledged, 
either of some of the doctrinal statements of the Creed, 
or of its peremptory assertion of a principle, borne out 
by every line of the New Testament, that men will be 
held responsible for their acceptance of God's revelation 
no less than for their obedience to His moral law. 1 

Scarcely less suggestive than the Evangelical atti- 
tude towards the Athanasian Creed, is the line taken 
by (I fear) the great body of English Dissenters on the 
Education question, which inevitably reminds one of 
the advice of the false mother in Solomon's judgment. 
Better that all our children should be brought up in an 
" unsectarian " religion — that is, without any faith at 
all — than that any of them should be taught the 
Apostles' Creed, which happens to be a distinctive 
formulary of two, not inconsiderable, Christian " de- 
nominations." 2 Such a system is a far more serious 

1 It is worth remarking that those Protestant communities which have 
dropped the Athanasian Creed have, as a rule, either retained a very- 
faltering hold on the doctrine of the Holy Trinity, or abandoned it 
altogether. The American Episcopal Church cannot fairly be quoted as 
an exception, for — not to insist on the necessarily conservative influence 
of a hierarchy — it is not yet a century old, and there is understood to be 
a growing desire among its more orthodox members for the restoration 
of what was hastily cast away in an age which, to say the least, gave a 
peculiar prominence to the negative side of its beliefs. 

2 Since the above passage was written, it has received a striking con- 



xx Preface. 

evil, both in theory and practice, than pure secularism, 
for it not only omits all genuine religious teaching, 
but supplants it by a spurious substitute. And there is 
a further reason for noticing the matter here, because 
" the religious difficulty " of education, of which we 
have heard so much during the last few years, is 
notoriously and solely due to the divided state of 
Christendom. But for that, we should never have 
heard of the strange, undertaking to construct, what 
one of the Anglican Bishops the other day justly 
termed " a new religion," viz., the theological residuum 
extracted by eliminating whatever is distinctive in 
the teaching of any of the hundred or so of, I was 

firmation in the report of a debate on the subject in the Wesleyan Con- 
ference, extending over two days and ending in a drawn battle (see Times 
of August 14 and 15). The Wesleyans have usually been regarded as 
denoniinationalists, but with many of them the desire for a privilegium 
against Anglican and Roman Catholic schools appears to have overpowered 
every other feeling. Those who supported the resolution against denomi- 
national education dwelt avowedly, and almost exclusively, on the argu- 
ment that it enabled "Papists" and Anglicans to train their children in 
their own faith. As the mover of the resolution (Rev. W. Arthur) put it, 
" Their choice lay between Popery and the Bible." It is right to say that 
several ministers spoke on the other side, one of whom (Rev. E. E. Jenkins), 
honestly avowed that " he would rather have the Bible explained to a 
child of his in a Ritualist or Broad Church school than have it simply read 
in a cold and lifeless manner in a school where no explanation was given. 
He would rather be a Papist than an Atheist or a Unitarian." This is 
the language both of Christianity and of common sense ; if the Bible is 
to be read in school without note or comment, it had much better be read 
in Hebrew. 



Preface. xxi 

going to say, Christian sects in the country. 1 But, 
in presence of Jews and Secularists, it may well he 
questioned if the existence of a personal God must 
not he relegated to the forhidden category of " denomi- 
national" "beliefs; ahout the divinity of Christ there 
is confessedly no question at all. And the education 
difficulty has its political as well as its religious side. 
If a Eoman Emperor wished that his people had hut 
one neck, a modern statesman might with hetter reason 
wish, on the lowest ground, that they had hut one 
religion. 

It has, indeed, been suggested that what is really 
wanted, and is alone practicable, is " a better manage- 
ment of our differences." And it is well, no doubt, to 
cultivate friendly relations with those from whom we 
differ, so far as it can be done without any compromise 
of principle. . A better understanding between the 
members of divided communions is the first step, as 

1 Bishop Magee, whose speech is referred to in the text, speaks of 
"126 religious fractions of the country." — See Guardian for July 24, 
1872. It is gratifying to learn that this hopeful experiment is actually 
ahout to be tried in Japan, where it is announced that " the Government 
has decided on the promulgation of a new form of religion, after careful 
consultation with the most noted exponents of each sect, and all will he 
compelled to conform thereto. The new religion will be enlightened, 
simple, and adapted to common sense, and is likely to meet the approval of 
all classes." Perhaps it may ; the Japanese are said to be about the most 
irreligious and immoral people on the face of the earth. 



xxii Preface. 

the lecturer has pointed out, towards the desired 
reconciliation ; the first, but not the last. To coalesce 
on a basis of mutual disagreement, 

" Thou, for my sake, at Alla's shrine, 
And I at any god's, for thine," 

is one thing ; it is quite another to meet in the unity 
of a common faith. The rule of " liberty in what is 
doubtful, and charity in all things " is most excellent, 
as far as it goes, but it will secure no inward or lasting 
harmony between those who are at variance on the 
essential truths of revelation. Had the early Church 
been united, in its stand against the Pagan empire, on 
the principle of agreeing to differ, the ten persecutions 
would have been reduced by nine, for there would have 
been nobody left to persecute. It is not without 
reason, accordingly, that Dr. Dollinger lays down, as an 
indispensable condition of all negotiations for reunion, 
the acceptance not only of Holy Scripture, but also 
of the three oecumenical Creeds, interpreted by the 
teaching of the ancient Church, before East and West 
were separated. This was in fact the ground taken, 
and with perfect success for the moment, at the Council 
of Florence, though insincerity on both sides, and lust 
of dominion on one, reduced the agreement to a fiasco : 



Preface. xxiii 

and we have a more permanent record of the positive 
results of such an appeal in the independent but 
concurrent witness of the dogmatic canons of Trent 
and the " Orthodox Confession of Faith," sanctioned 
in 1672 by the Eastern Synod of Bethlehem. 1 

But it would be a grievous mistake to suppose that 
Protestants alone are interested in the reunion of 
Christendom, as neither are they alone responsible for 
its divisions. There are few quarrels, public or private, 
in which the fault lies wholly on one side, and the 
Eeformation is certainly not one of them. The great 
ecclesiastical revolution which dates from the ninth 
century, as it was the immediate occasion of the sepa- 
ration of East and West, became also the remote cause 
of the schism of the sixteenth century, by giving the first 
impulse to the new administrative system, which had by 
that time attained such enormous dimensions. And there 
was unfortunately much on the Catholic side at that 



i It is admitted "by theologians, on both, sides, that the continued 
quarrel between the Latin and Greek Churches still hinges on the dispute 
about the primacy, which was its source ; and that if this were amicably 
settled, the remaining differences, including the question of the Filioque, 
would not be difficult of adjustment. See on this point the testimony of a 
recent ultramontane writer, Father Tondini, who quotes a dissertation of 
the learned Belgian Jesuit, De Buck, Pope of Rome, and Popes of the 
Oriental Church, pp. 4, 5 ; and cf. the speech of the Bussian deputy, Dr. 
Ossinin, at the Munich Congress last year. 



xxiv Preface. 

critical epoch to deepen and embitter the antagonism 
which had long been growing up, and had left its mark on 
the Councils, as well as on the literature and religious 
life, of the fifteenth century. To speak of Tetzel's 
indulgence-box as the cause of the Beformation, is to 
confound sign with substance, but it was one of many 
outward indications of a state of things sure sooner or 
later to produce an explosion, if it was not remedied. 
And the remedy of the counter-reformation, besides 
being partial, came too late. Had all Popes of that 
age been like-minded with Adrian vi., and all Cardinals 
such as Contarini and Sadolet, the religious history of 
the last three centuries might have been a very different 
one ; and the intolerant spirit which helped to create 
the breach has lived on to keep it open and widen it. 
We have all, Catholics and Protestants alike, been far 
too ready to hug ourselves in self-complacent isolation, 
and too little disposed, in the words of " the profound 
and pious Mohler," to " stretch a friendly hand to 
one another, and exclaim, in the consciousness of a 
common guilt, ' We all have erred ; the Church alone 
cannot err. We all have sinned ; the Church alone is 
spotless.' This open confession of guilt on loth sides" 
adds the author, " will be followed by the festival of 



Preface. xxv 

reconciliation." l And that open confession, which Mohler 
desiderated forty years ago, is a desideratum still. If 
Protestants are narrow and unreasonable, and refuse, as 
they often do, to look an inch beyond the bare letter 
of the Bible, as interpreted by what they call their 
private judgment, but what is in reality a mere floating 
Protestant tradition, Catholics, on the other hand, are 
apt to content themselves with pointing proudly, almost 
scornfully, to the unbroken unity of the Church, and 
telling outsiders to take care of themselves; the loss 
is theirs alone. 

The statement is hardly accurate in the letter, for 
whenever there has been any serious thought of recon- 
ciling East and West, the Popes themselves have always 
dealt with the Easterns as constituting a portion of 
the Church, not as mere outsiders. But I do not care 
to wrangle over niceties of terminology. However we 
interpret the unity of the Church, the broad fact re- 
mains that Christendom is divided. To the outward 
eye, and as a witness to mankind, the Church is no 
longer one, as it was in the early ages, as it was in 
Western Europe up to the sixteenth century. Then, 

i Mohler' s Symbolism, Eng. Trans., vol. ii. p. 32, first published in 
1832. The passage is quoted in Cardinal Wiseman's Letter to Lord 
Shrewsbury, 



xxvi Preface. 

like Hini who sent her, the divine messenger spoke 
with authority, for her credentials were visibly written 
on her regal brow : incessu patuit dea. There was 
one unfailing answer to doubts and difficulties, which 
was felt to be practically conclusive ; and though no 
one could be better able than St. Augustine to grapple 
with intellectual error, his most effective argument lay 
in an appeal to fact ; Securus judicat orbis terrarum. 
It is not so now, when the orbis terrarum is divided, 
and the Church's witness is discredited by the 
discordant clamours of hostile sects. Protestant 
countries have no monopoly of scepticism. It is 
as rife, at the very least, in France and Italy as in 
England. Only the other day a popular French 
newspaper announced that " Christianity has fatally 
disorganized civilisation, and its advent may be denned 
as ' the first invasion of the barbarians.' Now, all 
the merit of the barbarians was to arrive at the 
point where there should be no more barbarians : in 
the same way the advantage of Christianity is to arrive 
at the point where there will be neither Pagans nor 
Christians, but freethinkers, definitely liberated from 
every God" 1 Why has the French Church, with her 

1 Hepublique Frangaise, quoted in the Times of July 15, 1872. 



Preface. xxvii 

vast machinery, her eloquent preachers, her devoted 
priesthood, so little hold on the male intellect of the 
country, that public opinion is more than tolerant of 
Atheism ? Several answers might be given, and 
indeed have been given, in detail by those best 
qualified to speak ; 1 but they will be found ultimately 
to resolve themselves into that one radical evil, which 
is the fruitful source of such manifold corruption and 
disease, the disunion of Christendom. To quote the 
testimony of one of the ablest of our living writers, 
who cannot certainly be accused of excessive eccle- 
siastical sympathies : " As things are, rationalism 
and fatalistic reveries may be laboriously confuted, 
but amidst the energies and aspirations of a regenerated 
Christendom they would spontaneously pass away." 2 

The question before us then is one which, apart from 
all motives of charity for others, Catholics, for their 
own sakes, cannot afford to ignore. All sections of our 
distracted Christendom, each in its own way, are 

1 See, e.g. a remarkable passage at the close of Father Gratry's Second 
Letter to Mgr. Dechamps (pp. 49, 50), on "the school of error" within 
the Church, which is the great hindrance to her progress. 

2 Goldwin Smith's Lectures on the Study of History, p. 181. The writer 
had just said, " The reunion of Christendom is likely at last to become 
a practical aim. Probably it would be a greater service to humanity, 
on philosophical as well as religious grounds, to contribute the smallest 
unit towards this consummation, than to construct the most perfect 
demonstration of the free personality of man." 



xxviii Preface. 

suffering the penalty of a common sin, and till this 
is frankly acknowledged on all sides there can be no 
hope of reconciliation. I have said that an union on 
the basis of mutual disagreement would be at once 
useless and impossible, but it is no less unreal to 
propose an unconditional surrender. He who wills 
the end must will the means, and those who adopt this 
tone towards their separated brethren cannot be credited 
with any sincere desire for that peace which — let us 
remember — is promised hominibus bonce voluntatis. In 
fact, as Dr Dollinger has pointed out, there is no greater 
hindrance to reunion than the line taken on the subject 
by a powerful party in the Church, which found 
singularly clear and forcible expression some years ago 
in a characteristic pronouncement of the Dublin Review 
against an eirenic publication, then recently issued by 
a devout and learned Catholic layman. " The Church 
apostolic, undivided, and universal," rejoined his critic, 
" stands alone among other religious communities, with 
everything to bestow, nothing to receive." She admits 
no right to parley with her, "her call, whether to 
individuals or communities, is a summons not to treat 
but to surrender. She sits as judge in her own 
controversy, and the only plea she admits is a Con- 



Preface. xxix 

fiteor, the only prayer she listens to a Miserere!' How 
far such language breathes the true spirit of the Church 
or of the Church's Lord, how far it is consistent with 
the recorded utterances of some of the wisest of her 
pontiffs and the holiest of her Saints, or with the 
precedents of former negotiations with external bodies, 
I do not stay to examine here. 1 Those who are familiar 
with the facts will have no difficulty in answering the 
question for themselves. It is enough for my present 
purpose to observe that such is unhappily the habitual 
language, and represents the habitual policy, of what 
Dr. Newman has characterized as an " aggressive, 
insolent faction," but which just now is tyrannously 
dominant in the Church. 

Let me give but one example of this. Ten years 
ago, Ketteler, Bishop of Mayence, one of the most 
influential of the German episcopate, published a 
work under the title of Liberty, Authority, and the 
Church? which contained the most frank and full 
confession of the terrible evils resulting both from 
the earlier rupture between East and West, and from 
" the no less deplorable division of the Catholic Church 

1 Some remarks on this point will be found in my c ' Postscript on Catholic 
Unity," in Essays on the Reunion of Christendom. 

2 Freiheit, Autoritat und Kirche, Mainz, 1862. 



xxx Preface, 

in the West, which for three centuries has preyed on 
our vitals, and is the source of such deadly mischief." 
He urges and conjures all sincere Christians " to pray 
for the reunion of all the Christian confessions/' and 
" would still more rejoice to see members of different 
Christian communities deliberate together for the recital 
of some common prayer/' — exactly, by the way, what was 
done in England fifteen years ago, and has since been 
condemned by the Roman Inquisition. 1 The Bishop 
goes on to say that nearly all the charges brought against 
the Church spring out of misapprehensions, " and these 
almost always have their origin in the imperfections and 
infirmities of members of the Church ; " and then he 
pointedly insists, for the information of Protestants, 
that the infallibility of the Church " resides only in the 
whole body of the Episcopate united to the successor 
of St. Peter, and extends only to truths proclaimed by 
Christ." 2 The work also contained emphatic assertions 
of the rights of conscience and the absolute unlawful- 
ness of all religious coercion. It naturally excited 
considerable attention and very general sympathy in 

1 The A. P. U. C. was founded on the feast of the Nativity of our Lady, 
1857, including clergy and laity of the English and Eoman Catholic 
Churches among its first members. 

2 The passage is cited at length in my Letter to F. Lochhart, pp. 107- 
110. 



Preface. xxxi 

Germany, and was as naturally most unacceptable to 
the party whose principles it so directly contravened, 
and who have the ear of Eome. On account of the 
author's position it was not put on the Index, but it 
was well understood by himself as well as by others to 
be implicitly condemned in the Syllabus, 1 and, which 
is the main point, Bishop Ketteler has found it discreet 
to adopt an entirely different line on religious questions 
since then. 

So much for the tyrannous influence of the dominant 
faction. That their attitude towards external com- 
munions, which recognises nothing but a " Confiteor 
and a Miserere" must prove, as it always has proved, 
absolutely fatal, so far as it extends, to the very idea of 
conciliation, is obvious on the face of it, and must be 
perfectly obvious to themselves. Not such was the 
attitude or the spirit of Leander, Sancta Clara, and 
Panzani, of Bossuet or Spinola, of Adrian vl, Urban vin., 
Innocent XL, Clement xiv. ; and only by proceeding in 
a spirit the very opposite of this can the wounds of 
Christendom be healed. There have been many on all 

1 He attempted indeed in a subsequent pamphlet, Deutschland nach dem 
Kriege (1867), to explain away the force of the implied censure by the 
strange hypothesis, that the articles of the Syllabus did not contain a 
general principle, but only applied to particular countries ! 



xxxii Preface. 

sides, Catholics, Anglicans, Lutherans, in former days 
as now, who have laboured and longed for that blessed 
consummation, and have not lived to see it ; some, like 
Spinola and Leibnitz, in one generation, Du Pin and 
Wake in another, whose names are indelibly associated 
with the sacred cause. And in almost every case the 
fairest hopes have been wrecked, not on a religious, but 
a political difficulty, as seems only too likely to be the 
case with the present unionistic movement in the East, 
to which Dr Dollinger has referred. What the good 
Bishop Doyle said of one such attempt is more or less 
true of all or nearly all : " its failure was owing more to 
Princes than to Priests, more to State policy than to a 
difference of belief/' How true are the concluding 
words of the same letter : " They are pride and points 
of honour which keep us divided on many subjects, 
not a love of Christian humility, charity, and truth ! " * 
And there are many more, of every clime and age, 
in remote English villages, in the seclusion of foreign 
convents, in the privacy of domestic life, before 
gleaming altars, on lingering death-beds, who have 
watched, and toiled, and prayed for the dawn of that 

1 Letter to Lord Ripon (1824), published in Fitzpatrick's Life, Times, 
and Correspondence of Dr. Doyle, pp. 421 sqq., and in Union Review, 
vol. i. pp. 12 sqq. 



Preface. xxxiii 

second Pentecost, who are praying for it still in the 
brightness of the everlasting sunshine, whose names we 
know not, and shall never know on earth, over whose 
forgotten graves their guardian angels whisper that 
most musical of all the Beatitudes, Beati pacifici, 
quoniam filii Dei vocabuntur. There are many yet 
among us who are striving and praying for it now. And 
besides all these there is a vast multitude of interces- 
sors, whom no man can number, of every kindred, 
tribe, and tongue, sunflushed with the glory of the 
Uncreated Vision, and gazing on the pure reflection of 
unsullied truth that is mirrored for ever and for ever 
on the waveless surface of the crystal sea, whose sight 
is purged from all earthly film and their souls from 
taint of human passion, who cease not day and night 
to cry continually, " How long, Lord, how long ? " 
And we, too, if we really cared about the matter, 
should make it a subject of definite contemplation, 
definite action, definite, united, persevering, pertina- 
cious prayer. We should, in the startling language of 
Scripture, " weary " the Supreme Judge with our impor- 
tunities; 1 we should interest all the glorified host in 

1 The original word (in Luke xviii. 5), un-ama^ ( Vulg. " sngillet ") is far 
stronger, and will hardly indeed bear literal translation. A more tre- 



xxxiv Preface. 

our supplications to the Most High. Omnes Sancti et 
Sanctce Dei, intercedite pro nobis ! 

And to all who, in whatever communion, and under 
whatever form, worship in sincerity our common Lord, 
I' would say, Do not put from you the suggestion as 
unpractical, or trivial, or inopportune, as a morbid 
craving for the satisfaction of an ideal want. A 
craving which is rooted in the deepest instincts of our 
moral nature, and is strengthened by menacing pheno- 
mena in the present condition of society, whose 
accumulated weight presses more heavily each day on 
the intellect and conscience, is no mere sickly dream ; 
and a divine ideal can never be impossible of attain- 
ment. If we have come to look on religious disunion 
as a chronic and tolerable evil, or even — and there are 
some who seem so to view it — as a positive advantage, 
that is only because long use has inured us to a state 
of things which ought to be intolerable to Christians, 
as it has long been the palmary argument and impreg- 
nable stronghold of the mocking enemies of Christ. 
" Go ye, make disciples of all nations, baptizing them," 
was the original commission of the Church, and now, at 
the end of eighteen centuries of missionary enterprise, 

mendous assertion of the duty and efficacy of prayer it would be impossi- 
ble to conceive. 



Preface. xxxv 

and when every heathen land has been incarnadined 
in martyr-blood, three-fourths of mankind are unbap- 
tized ! " That they may all be one, even as We are 
One, that the world may believe that Thou hast sent 
Me," was the Eedeemer's dying intercession for His 
followers; and now, in this nineteenth century since 
His Crucifixion, there are more Christians sects in 
England alone than there were believers in the Upper 
Eoom at Jerusalem after the Ascension ! And what is 
the upshot ? Simply this, that every shred of the revela- 
tion He committed to His Church is openly disputed 
by those who profess to be His disciples, while the 
great mass of the poor, to whom especially the Gospel 
was to be preached, are left to live the life and die 
the death of heathen in a nominally Christian land, 
because those who should have taught them His word 
and ministered His sacraments have wasted their 
energies, and lost half their faith and all their authority, 
in perpetual bickerings with one another as to what 
that word and those sacraments are. Truly, if Chris- 
tianity be a divine revelation, and the Christian Church 
is to be its teacher, the religious outcome of the last 
three centuries of division is a spectacle to make 
infidels triumph and angels weep. 



xxxvi Preface. 

But anyhow the case is hopeless, and it will be our 
wisdom to acquiesce quietly in the inevitable : reunion 
is an idle dream. Why ? Simply because we choose to 
make it so. There is a story of a farmer in a country 
parish, who was consulted by the rector, after a 
dry season, as to whether he should use the prayer 
for rain. " Well, sir," was the reply, " there is no use 
in your praying for rain while the wind continues in 
the north." We have acted for three centuries and 
more in the spirit of that pious and intelligent rustic, 
and during all that period the theological wind has 
set very steadily from the north. As long as we 
continue to emulate his example, we have only ourselves 
to thank if it should blow from the same quarter for 
the next three centuries. We have not, because we 
ask not ; we ask, and have not, because we ask amiss. 
Too many of us do not ask at all. Like the gods of 
Epicurus, "they lie beside their nectar," and regard 
the religious condition of the world, if they ever 
think about it, much as the deity of a certain school 
of modern thinkers is supposed to contemplate, if he 
ever does contemplate, the universe he created, if 
indeed he did create it, — with an otiose if not 
cynical detachment. Reunion, they say, would be a 



Preface. xxxvii 

miracle, and to pray for miracles is idle, if not 
presumptuous. And many, who would shrink from 
the virtual atheism of such an avowal, are unreal 
when they pray for unity, because their normal 
standard of conduct and opinion is in direct contra- 
diction with their prayers ; out of the same mouth 
proceeds blessing and cursing. If there is truth in 
the proverb, Qui laborat orat, if it is unreal to ask for 
what we will make no efforts to attain, still less can 
we expect our petitions to be heard, if we do all in 
our power to thwart them. While we habitually feel 
and act on the tacit assumption that our divisions 
are irreconcileable, that all the right is on one 
side, and the sole legitimate object of discussion is 
not peace, but victory ; while we are eager to in- 
criminate and slow to explain, resolved to learn nothing 
and forget nothing, to admit no faults on our own 
side, and condone none on the other; while we are 
never weary of flinging at each other's heads the 
fagots of Smithfleld and the gibbets of Tyburn, 
like schoolboys in a snowball match, — so long we 
are doing our utmost to create the impossibility we 
affect to deplore. Far better let the dead bury their 
dead, and, while we respect the constancy of the 



xxxviii Preface. 

sufferers on either side, not seek to make controversial 
capital out of past atrocities, which disgraced religion ; 
still less, as some would have us, desire to emulate 
them. Mary and her evil counsellors did more, no 
doubt, than all the Eeformers put together, to brand 
the tradition of Protestant exclusiveness into the heart 
and conscience of England; and we, if we are wise, 
shall take warning by their example, how unity can 
never be restored. 1 Actual persecution is, of course, 
out of the question in the present state of society, but 

1 It is impossible to condemn too strongly the Marian burnings, 
whether on grounds of principle or of policy. But it is fair to remember 
that the sufferers never shrank from inflicting the penalties they were 
ready to endure bravely, when their turn came : they had no difference 
with their persecutors about the principle, but only about its application. 
Cranmer, of course, I put out of the reckoning altogether. It may or 
may not be true that he held the fingers of the peevish boy in whose 
name he misruled England, while forcing him to sign the death-warrant 
of a visionary little less orthodox and infinitely more honest than himself ; 
but anyhow he was no more a genuine persecutor than a genuine martyr. 
He burnt impugners of the Eeal Presence as long as it suited his interests, 
and he was burnt for denying it— probably with sincerity, for his range of 
belief seems to have been a limited one — after he had solemnly recanted 
his denial. But Latimer, who was a typical Beformer and unquestion- 
ably honest, preached a sermon worthy of Torquemada, while Prior 
Forest was being roasted to death over a slow fire for denying the 
spiritual supremacy of Henry vni. And I am afraid there can be no 
doubt that Elizabeth's Jesuit victims would have been equally ready to 
burn any one who denied the spiritual or temporal supremacy of the Pope. 
" The toleration of heresy," says Sir J. Mackintosh, "was deemed by men 
of all persuasions to be as unreasonable as it would now be thought to 
propose the impunity of murder." For copious authorities on the Pro- 
testant side, see a remarkable article on " The Protestant Theory of 
Persecution " in the Rambler for March 1862. 



Preface. xxxix 

the persecuting temper can express itself in a hundred 
ways, and is the precise contradictory of that temper 
in which alone we can meet our alienated fellow- 
Christians with any prospect of ultimate agreement. 

And never surely was the obligation more urgent, 
never was there more in the circumstances of the 
day to supply both warning and encouragement, than 
now. Ours is in one sense a peculiarly religious age. 
Eeligious questionings, aspirations, doubts, interpene- 
trate its literature and thought, trouble its policy, and 
mingle in the details of its social life. It organizes 
religious meetings, congresses, and synods of every 
hue. The religious question, as it has been said, is the 
order of the day. And this is a ground of encourage- 
ment. On the other hand, it is also a very irreligious 
age. Scepticism has never before been so open- 
mouthed, so widespread, and withal so oppressively 
respectable as it has recently become. Its apostles 
do not scruple to assure us, with an engaging frankness, 
that virtue and vice are " natural products in the same 
sense as sugar and vitriol," or that prayer is an obsolete 
superstition to be classed with the belief in " witches, 
dreams, astrology, and auguries of good or evil luck," 
for which the civilized world will learn to substitute 



xl Preface. 

the equally " ennobling " and "consoling" contempla- 
tion of the " solidarity between themselves and what 
surrounds them through the endless reactions of 
physical laws." But still it is not the mocking scep- 
ticism of Tom Paine or Voltaire. It is sedate, refined, 
decorous, respectable ; it sometimes almost seems to 
be devout. But if we are tempted to let ourselves 
imagine that in losing its grossness it has lost its 
sting, we are likely to be cruelly undeceived. And 
indeed already there are not wanting ominous signs of 
the spirit which deluged the Colosseum with Christian 
blood, or voices among those which would banish 
the " pale Galilean " from an emancipated world, that 
do not suffer us to forget in what guise the goddess 
Eeason was enthroned, not a century ago, on the high 
altar of Notre Dame. 

Such moral and intellectual aberrations will never 
be disposed of by mere force of reasoning, however 
laborious and acute. They thrive in the cold shade 
of our mutual hatreds, and would fade away like 
a noisome exhalation in the bracing atmosphere 
and clear strong sunshine of a Christendom at unity 
with itself. But if there still remains "the little 
rift within the lute," if the trumpet still gives an 



Preface. xli 

uncertain sound, when it summons us to the battle 
with Antichrist, — and the spirit of Antichrist is rife 
among us now — how shall his assault be met by the 
disjointed and spasmodic efforts of a straggling multi- 
tude, without leader, discipline, or common watchword ? 
But it is the glory of Divine Providence to bring good 
out of evil, and the infidel aggression, which threatens 
us on every side, may well be His predestined instru- 
ment for reuniting Christian believers in presence of 
a common foe. 

On the special bearing of the Eeunion question on 
the Established Church I will make but one remark 
here. The present agitation against the Athanasian 
Creed, and the official relations of the clergy to a 
legislature which has already sanctioned adultery, and 
is only too likely ere long to sanction incest, must have 
brought home two facts very distinctly to the minds 
even of its most attached and loyal adherents. In the 
first place, they cannot fail to perceive in what a difficult 
position an isolated communion finds itself, whatever 
may be pleaded in defence or excuse of its isolation, 
when called upon to vindicate the most elementary 
principles of Christian morality and belief. 1 And, 

1 By the present law a clergyman is bound, on application, to allow the 

d 



xlii Preface. 

secondly, these difficulties afford a fresh illustration of 
the insecure tenure on which the Establishment, as 
such, holds its ground. 1 And disestablishment, when- 
ever it comes, while leaving the Church more free to 
negotiate with external bodies, will also make the need 
for external support more urgent, by withdrawing the 
prestige and cohesive power supplied by union with the 
State. 

And now, I am afraid I have detained the reader 
too long, if indeed he has allowed himself to be 
detained, from studying testimony far weightier and 
more authoritative than any I could hope to give. It 
is in itself a remarkable fact, that "the venerable 
Nestor of Catholic theology," as he has been styled, 
whose life has been spent as a Catholic professor and 
prelate in the very centre of northern Catholicism, and 
who has himself, in former days, devoted the vast 
resources of his intellect and learning to the exposure 



use of his church for the re-marriage (so-called) of a divorced parishioner, 
whether guilty of previous adultery or not, and may be compelled to 
marry the " innocent party " himself ; every such pretended marriage being 
of course a nullity and a sacrilege. A notorious case occurred not long 
ago in one of the principal parish churches of London. 

1 This is expressly recognised in Dr. Pusey's letter on the subject, pub- 
lished in the Times of Aug. 13. 



Preface. xliii 

of Protestant error, 1 should, during the last twelve 
years, have scarcely published a single work without 
pointedly introducing this question of Eeunion, which 
he has now, when ultramontanism has just won its 
crowning triumph, set himself expressly to discuss. 
Speaking from the platform of a long experience, a 
profound acquaintance with the past history of the 
Church, and an extensive familiarity with the present 
condition of both Catholic and Protestant society, he 
declares that union to be at once a supreme necessity 
of the Christian commonwealth and a perfectly 
practicable achievement. It is not the voice of a 
youthful zealot, or a dreaming mystic, or a fiery 
reformer, which addresses us, but a venerable priest, 
full of years and of honours, cautious by temperament, 
and of a nation pre-eminent for its critical acumen, 
conservative and Catholic to the backbone in his 
instincts and habits, who sums up in these weighty 
words the concentrated convictions of a lifetime. It 
is indeed the utterance of a mitis sapientia, chastened 
by long years of toil and trial, but also of an 
enthusiasm, in the best and truest sense of the word, 

1 See, e.g. his Die Reformation in 3 vols, and his Martin Luther. 



xliv Preface. 

which only shines out with brighter lustre through the 
veil of patient suffering and advancing age, because it 
is based on the faith of an unerring promise, and lives 
in the habitual vision of the world beyond the grave. 

H. K 0. 

Feast of the Nativity of our Lady, 1872. 



LECTUKE I. 

GENERAL REVIEW OF THE RELIGIOUS CONDITION OF 
THE WORLD. 

rT^HE Christian portion of the human family may be 
reckoned at some 350 million souls, and includes 
about thirty per cent, of the inhabitants of the world. 
But Christians are divided into many larger or smaller 
communities or churches, which mutually exclude each 
other, allowing no communion of worship, sacraments, 
or prayer, and accusing one another of errors or de- 
partures from the teaching of Christ so serious as to 
endanger salvation. 

Divisions and formations of separate churches were 
not indeed infrequent during the first thousand years 
after Christ. But they were generally of short duration, 
and after a while were reabsorbed into the great Catholic 
Church. So it was with the Churches which took their 
rise from the Arian controversies, and those which 
had separated mainly on ethical grounds, referring to 

A 



2 Reunion of the Churches. 

ecclesiastical discipline, such as the Novatians, Dona- 
tists, Montanists, and most of the Western sects. 
But this cannot be said of the separations and newly 
formed communities of the last thousand years. These 
still continue, that is, the principal parties or churches, 
with, on the whole, no diminution of vital and expansive 
power. Let us take a bird's-eye view of them. 

The Greek Catholic or Eastern Church, which 
numbers about seventy-five million members, in Eussia, 
Turkey, and Greece, has separated from the Eoman 
Catholic, or Western Church, which contains about 180 
millions. This separation began about the middle of 
the eleventh century, but was only consummated in 
the thirteenth, in consequence of the taking of Con- 
stantinople and violent subjugation of the Greeks by 
Westerns acting under papal inspiration. To this 
Church, which takes the name of "Orthodox," are 
closely related the Nestorians, the remnant of a Church 
once widely spread in the interior of Asia, which has 
been separated from the rest of the Christian world 
since the middle of the fifth century, in consequence of 
the controversies about the Person of Christ, and the 
Monophysites, who separated about the same time, and 
from similar causes, as representatives of the opposite 



Religious Condition of the World. 3 

view, and formed a far more numerous body than the 
Nestorians, comprising three national Churches, the 
Armenian, the Coptic in Egypt, and the Abyssinian. 

And as the Church has been separated since the 
twelfth century into two numerically unequal halves, 
each going its own way and accusing the other of 
schism and heresy, so in the sixteenth century came the 
great split in the Western or Latin Church, which cut 
far deeper. Out of the reforming movement which 
after 1517 took possession of the whole populace of 
Western Europe, sprang by degrees new ecclesiastical 
societies, which are generically termed Protestant. And 
hence three great systems have grown up. There is 
first the Lutheran, covering Germany, Scandinavia, and 
the eastern coasts of Eussia, about thirty millions 
strong; then the Eeformed, including some twelve 
million inhabitants of Switzerland, the Netherlands, 
Scotland, and parts of Germany and Hungary. Dis- 
tinguished from both these is the English Episcopal 
Church, still as yet the State Church, which has kept 
closer in its constitution and worship to the two ancient 
Churches of the East and West, and from the compara- 
tive brevity and vagueness of the Thirty-nine Articles 
which form its doctrinal confession, is on the one hand 



4 Reunion of the Churches. 

Less widely removed from Catholic dogmas, while on 
the other it allows more room for differences of teach- 
ing and interpretation. 

Meanwhile, besides these great national Churches 
there sprang up at and after the time of the Eeformation 
many smaller sects, which, though several have died 
out, not only still survive — chiefly in England and 
North America — but are constantly being increased in 
number. There are at present about a hundred of these 
smaller religious communities, numbering some 18,000 
members. Many of them have never extended beyond 
the land of their birth, and are hardly known by 
name elsewhere. Others, especially the Anabaptists, 
count their adherents by millions. Nor are these sects 
always based on doctrinal distinctions. Sometimes 
peculiarities in social arrangements or worship, or 
methods of education and individual culture, form the 
leading characteristic, as is shown in the case of the 
Moravians and the English and American Methodists. 
It is chiefly in the Anglo-Saxon race, in both its English 
and American branches, that the capacity and inclina- 
tion for forming sects has developed itself, while the 
German people, if we except the Swabian branch, has 
never manifested such a tendency. 



Religious Condition of the World. 5 

The circle of thought within which most of these 
sects revolve is a very narrow one, and the differences 
are often confined to points of infinitesimal importance. 
Not unfrequently jealousy or love of notoriety, or even 
a financial speculation, is the inspiring motive of the 
founders of a new sect ; but the mere fact of their so 
often succeeding proves how ready the people are to 
welcome such associations. 

It is true that smaller communities are sometimes 
distinguished by a stricter discipline and higher code 
of morality, for the individual is more supported and 
upheld by the body of which he is a member, more 
closely watched and far more dependent on the good 
opinion of the rest. This moral earnestness, and 
abstinence at least from ordinary vices, is generally, 
e.g., to be observed in the Anabaptist settlements, 
and their example benefits the members of other bodies 
also. 

Many of these little communities may exist for 
centuries without either injuring or profiting the 
rest of the world. They lead a quiet life, far from 
the busy throng of men, sometimes closely hemmed in 
by the adherents of antagonistic creeds, and thus, as 
it were, welded together, or perhaps united also by ties 



6 Reitnion of the Churches. 

of blood. And so they maintain themselves with 
indestructible vigour in spite of constant clangers and 
ill-treatment. In this way the Nestorians or Christians 
of St. Thomas have now existed for 1300 years in 
East India, and the Copts still longer in Egypt. 

We thus find two principal families of Christian 
Churches, — first the ancient Churches, whose continuity 
has never been interrupted, and which reach up by a 
regular succession to the first beginnings of Christianity, 
however great may have been their internal changes ; 
such are the Eastern Church with its daughters, the 
Eussian, Armenian, Coptic, and Nestorian ; and the 
Western Catholic Church. The other family is com- 
posed of those Churches which have issued directly or 
indirectly from that powerful religious movement called 
the Eeformation, and the communities and sects which 
have again broken off from them. 

This great number of divisions and separate Churches 
has its good as well as its evil consequences, but we 
shall have no doubt on a closer inspection as to which 
preponderate. As to the first, it may be said that every 
new sect or Church is an experiment, or a trial of certain 
doctrines or usages and regulations peculiar to the sect. 
Here Gamaliel's maxim may be applied, and Church 



Religious Condition of the World. 7 

history regarded as a great course of experiments ; what 
has held its own, or even increased in strength with 
the lapse of time, has conquered for itself the right of 
permanence, while what passes away and disappears 
under the stream was not worth preserving. But then 
history and experience contradict this view. Islam, 
which must be considered at bottom a Christian heresy, 
the bastard offspring of a Christian father and Jewish 
mother, and is indeed more closely allied to Chris- 
tianity than Manicheeism, which is reckoned a 
Christian sect, — Islam has now maintained for 1250 
years an at least outwardly unshaken dominion over a 
large portion of mankind, 120 millions, and moreover 
still makes fresh advances every year in Africa, Aus- 
tralia, and the interior of India, which exceed the 
progress of Christianity in those countries. It has 
made large encroachments on Christianity, from which 
it has alienated whole regions, without, on the other 
hand, suffering any important losses through conversion 
to our faith. And yet how clear it is to us that history 
has already pronounced sentence on this religion, and 
sealed its rejection, when we consider the once flourish- 
ing, now fallen, condition of those lands where Islam 
prevails, and of their denizens. Such are Asia Minor, 



8 Reunion of the Churches. 

Syria, Persia, Cyprus, Egypt, and a closer inspection 
proves that it is precisely to their false religion that 
their unhappy condition and gradual decay and extinc- 
tion are due. Nor is this at all inconsistent with the 
fact that the same religion has benefited peoples in 
a lower stage of development, as has been recently 
observed in the case of negroes converted to Mahomet- 
anism in South Africa. 

It cannot be denied that there is something repul- 
sive in the present aspect of the Christian world, with 
its sharply-divided and hostile Churches and sects, 
mutually hating and incriminating one another. And 
were we not accustomed to the sight from our youth up, it 
would strike us as still uglier, and the contrast between 
the idea and the reality would be more glaring in our 
eyes. In all the other highest departments of life, in 
science, in art, the power of attraction and union of 
minds asserts itself, and sooner or later dissonance and 
hatred are lost in harmony. With religion alone it is 
different ; what according to its inmost essence was 
meant to be the most powerful bond of union, because 
possessed and filled with love, has been the cause of 
so many divisions — what was to establish peace has 
kindled strife and bloody wars — what was to give men 



Religious Condition of the World. 9 

certainty and confidence has provoked doubt and 
planted mistrust in their minds. The division of the 
two great ancient Churches of East and West is, or 
rather was, unmeaning, because of their essential unity 
of doctrine ; now, on the other hand, since July 1 8, 
1870, it is different. And here permit me to observe 
how perilous may be the consequences of this eccle- 
siastical division in the immediate future. 

There can be no question that, since the end of the 
Franco- German war, the Eastern question is the weighti- 
est, and at all events far the most difficult, question of 
the day. Considered from a purely political point of 
view, it must be called simply insoluble ; and yet on 
its ' solution hinges the future of Austria, and in no 
slight degree of the world generally, which has now to 
take in the German Empire. No doubt time might 
eventually bring a solution, but only in the distant 
future ; for the Turkish people, which now tyrannizes 
over millions of Christians, is, so to speak, at the 
point of death ; it decreases considerably every year, 
while the Christians steadily increase. But the situa- 
tion is too intolerable, and the impatience of mankind 
too great, to wait for the solution of time, and the 
great crisis is constantly forcing its way to the front. 



i o Reunion of the Churches. 

Eussians and Greeks — the great majority, that is, of 
the population of the Empire — are co-religionists, 
members of the same Church. Will Eussia be willing 
or able to look on quietly much longer on a situation 
such as all correspondents on the spot describe it 
to be, which no diplomatic intervention can touch, 
because it is grounded in the very nature of things, 
inasmuch as for the Mahometan conscience there is 
no rule but the Koran, which breathes only hatred and 
contempt for Christians ? And thus all the efforts of 
England, France, and Austria to avert the catastrophe 
have as yet been fruitless, except for gaining time. 
Eussia alone holds the keys of the destiny of the 
Turkish Empire. And who will contradict Eussia if 
she decides that it is a duty to be carried out by force 
of arms, to improve the desperate condition of the Chris- 
tians in that Empire ? Have not all the European 
powers acted from time to time on this principle ? But 
if only an ecclesiastical union between East and West 
were brought about, how completely would the whole 
situation be changed ! A general co-operation of the 
great Christian powers would then become possible for 
warding off the danger from both the Austrian and 
German Empires, and a solution in accordance with the 



Religious Condition of the World. 1 1 

balance of power in Europe might be found. More 
than that : slight as is the real difference between the 
Eusso- Greek and Latin Churches, the Eussian people 
are profoundly impressed with the belief, long since 
studiously fostered by their rulers, that theirs is the 
sole true and legitimate Church, and all foreign nations 
are to be regarded as heretical and unbelieving, and 
that, consequently every foreign war is a religious war 
of believers against unbelievers. It will be remem- 
bered by what means the Emperor Nicholas sought to 
increase and accentuate this national prejudice. His 
proclamation of March 26, 1848, is well known : "Hear 
and bow down, ye Gentiles, for God is with us f and 
his speech to the Eussian and Polish Bishops, on May 
26, 1849 : " The true faith survives in Eussia only ; in 
the West it is utterly lost." The Czar Alexander il, 
also, after his accession, addressed the army as "the 
true soldiers and champions of the Church, the throne, 
and the fatherland " — so that the Eussian soldier is in- 
spired by the belief that his first duty is to defend the 
Church with his arms. It is obvious what a lever this 
view supplies, and what an enthusiasm it may kindle in 
war, and how grave would be the danger for Germany 
if ever an anti-German or Panslavist party succeeded in 



12 Reunion of the Churches. 

involving the colossal Empire in a war with us, and this 
war came to be considered by Bnssia as a religious 
war. 

On the other hand, the Churches which sprang from 
the Eeformation of the sixteenth century have been 
gradually, and for the most part reluctantly, urged or 
violently driven into separation by profound differences 
of doctrine, and when once all intercommunion had 
been entirely broken off, the original differences of doc- 
trine grew wider, and were moulded into systems whose 
hard inflexible letter made all reconciliation impossible. 
Historically considered, we know that the Eeformation 
was inevitable, and that, when no room was allowed it 
in the bosom of the ancient Church, a breach of unity 
was the necessary consequence. Nor can we blind 
ourselves to the fact that it has had many beneficial 
results, and has in various ways proved a gain even to 
the ancient Church which was so hostile to it. We see 
that it has created a rich intellectual world, and given 
an impulse to every form of mental activity. It has 
become the most powerful and permanent force in 
modern history. But the three centuries and a half of 
its existence have apparently sufficed to bring out and 
mature whatever spiritual resources it contained within 



Religious Condition of the World. 13 

itself. That period has also supplied evidence that these 
new ecclesiastical creations have faults and defects 
of their own which they have no inherent power of 
remedying, and that they are incapable of really and 
permanently satisfying all the religious needs of man- 
kind. The morbid hankering after division, the dis- 
content of individuals, the incompetence to form any 
church organizations standing firmly on their own 
foundations, have long been sensibly felt ; and it 
is impossible not to perceive that in the first heat 
of the struggle and passionate excitement of the Ee- 
formation tempest, many doctrines and practices of the 
ancient Church were much too hastily rejected, leaving 
a gap it is difficult to fill up. The time will come, and 
in the opinion and desire of many is already come, 
when the Petrine and Pauline Churches will develope 
into a Johannean Church, or, as used to be said in 
mediaeval times, to the period of the Father and the 
Son will succeed the age of the Holy Ghost. And this 
would be brought about by the existing Churches being 
content to learn and receive of one another, and to 
impart to one another their peculiar possessions and 
privileges, and thus enter into the noblest community 
of goods, but above all, by their setting a higher price on 



14 Reunion of the Churches. 

the doctrines and creeds which they have inherited and 
confess in common than on what divides them. Many- 
will ask whether this is possible. I reply that it must 
be possible, for it is a duty. ISTo doubt a great purifica- 
tion and renewal of the Church in the sixteenth cen- 
tury was a pressing need : the condition of things had 
become untenable and intolerable. But this process 
might have been accomplished without the divisions 
which grew out of it, whereas not only have the Catho- 
lics separated from the Protestants, but among these 
last, the Lutherans have separated from the Eeformed 
(Calvinists), and the Anglicans from both alike. In 
this then we must acknowledge a grievous fault of men, 
originating in their passions and sinful errors, as history 
abundantly testifies. On that point all schools and 
parties are substantially agreed, only that each throws 
the whole blame, or the greater part of it, on its oppo- 
nents. Every Church maintains that the rest are bound 
to unite with it, and thus atone for the crime of their 
forefathers. 

That Christ, the Founder of the Church, desired and 
enjoined its unity is clear. In His Eucharistic prayer 
we read, " That they all may be one ; that as Thou, 
Father, art in Me and I in Thee, they also may be one in 



Religious Condition of the World. 15 

Us, that the world may believe that Thou hast sent Me." 1 
Nay, this unity is, as He further prays, to "be a perfect 
one, and therefore the most penetrating and purest con- 
ceivable among men. And here it is especially to be 
noted that this unity of Christian believers is itself to 
serve as the means to a further end; it is to be a testimony 
for the world in general, and for all nations, of the truth 
and divinity of the teaching of Christ. And such it 
was in the early ages. " See how these Christians love 
one another," was then a common saying of the heathen. 
According to the will of our Lord, men ought always to 
be able to say, " A religion which unites its adherents, 
and holds together a vast society so closely, without any 
coercion, through the Spirit which animates it, bears the 
impress of its truth and divinity." And thereby He 
has of course given us to understand that ecclesiastical 
divisions and a multiplicity of separate Churches will 
produce just the opposite impression on non-Christian 
nations, and on many Christians too, and will be to them 
a great stumblingblock and occasion of serious doubt 
as to the truth of Christianity. Any one who wishes 
to realize this has only to ask some educated Jew 
resident among us what impression the strife and 
controversy of the Churches makes upon him. 

1 John xvii. 21. 



1 6 Reunion of the Churches. 

At the same time, no Church can ignore the command 
and commission to teach and baptize heathen nations. 
It is a duty and mission laid upon us to bring within 
the reach of foreign nations the benefits of civilisation, 
culture, moral improvement, and elevation of both 
family and civil life, by the only possible means, of 
religious instruction and ecclesiastical organization, 
whereby we ourselves obtained them. But more than 
two-thirds of the inhabitants of the world are heathen; 
there are still 800 million souls unconverted to Chris- 
t52^ity. And yet we may truly say that almost the 
whole human race is possessed with a feeling of rest- 
lessness unknown even in the ages of the great migra- 
tion of nations, while at the same time the wonderfully 
increased facilities of intercourse have roused a passion 
for travel, and an irresistible impulse to more intimate 
union among different peoples. The most remote, ob- 
scure, and unknown corners of the earth are explored, 
all the laboriously constructed barriers of earlier days 
give way to pressure from without, or are torn down 
by the nations which erected them, and we observe 
with surprise, in how many parts of the earth civilized 
men and barbarians, Christians and heathen, jostle one 
another, so that in America Chinese meet and mingle 
with Europeans. We see how nations which have long 



Religious Condition of the World. 17 

remained sunk in the lowest depth of moral or intellec- 
tual stagnation, are suddenly drawn into the vortex of 
the great world-stream which has broken in upon them. 
It seems as though no nation of the world was to be 
allowed any longer to go on vegetating independently 
on its old foundations. Even the great civilized nations 
of Eastern Asia, the Hindus, the Chinese, the Japanese, 
are constrained to enter into European conditions and 
requirements, and to appropriate the arts and methods 
of education of the Christian West. But this picture, 
which I have only indicated by a few touches here, 
while on the one side it encourages the brightest hopes, 
discloses on the other some dark spots. The first is 
the fact, more and more forcing itself on the notice of 
observers, that many of the peoples now dwelling on the 
earth are not only incapable of any historical existence, 
but are inevitably doomed to destruction, and are, some 
slowly, some rapidly, fading away. The Indians in 
North and South America, the negroes in Australia, the 
inhabitants of the South Sea Islands, the Hottentots in 
South Africa, and other tribes, are disappearing. Of 
the once numerous tribes of North America, many are 
already extinct, and their very names forgotten. The 
most harmless contact with strangers, or the mere 

B 



1 8 Reimion of the Churches. 

presence of Europeans or their descendants, is enough 
to bring havoc on many of the native races. 

The study of geography has revealed a yet darker 
side in the present condition of the nations. Nature 
herself, the very soil, groans under the burden and curse 
of a false religion, — for when the people degenerate, 
nature herself grows brutalized and depraved. The 
earth is given men to till, but irreligious or misbe- 
lieving populations destroy instead of cultivating it; 
under their hands it becomes unfruitful, and loses its 
grace and -vegetation. Towns and villages decay, and 
gradually perish, and where once was a rich country 
and busy population, there is a howling wilderness. 
No land under Moslem rule can now be called a flourish- 
ing one. In the region between the Tigris and Euph- 
rates, the ancient Chaldea, the cradle of the human 
race, there is a widespread desolation, little agricul- 
ture, only a few decayed and impoverished towns, no 
villages, and a mere roving population, who know 
nothing of their ancestors, and sink deeper every year 
into a state of utter barbarism. All those fair and 
populous cities of which history tells, that vast, civilized 
and flourishing population which held its place there 
far into the middle ages, have disappeared, and if the 



Religions Condition of the World. 19 

reason is asked, there is but one reply — It is the work 
of a false religion ! What a spectacle is presented now 
by the once great and powerful Persian Empire, a 
country more than twice the size of Germany, but with 
only some five million inhabitants, with few towns, and 
none of which whole quarters are not in ruins, pillaged 
by a wretched despotic government, and now lying 
helpless under the assault of a deadly famine, while it 
feebly awaits the hour when Eussia may please to take 
it in hand. 1 And yet the very religion which exhibits 
these phenomena in Turkey, North Africa, and Egypt, 
and which one might suppose to be gradually dying out 
through the decay of the peoples who are under its 
curse, shows itself elsewhere full of youthful vigour and 
elasticity. In the Indian Archipelago and the interior 
of Africa, from the Mger to the Cape, it is in rapid 
advance, conquering whole heathen kingdoms in its 
course, and makes progress even among the Christian 
Abyssinians. But unfortunately there is no other reli- 
gion which has so deeply-rooted a hatred to Christianity 
as Mahometanism, and this hatred is engrained into 
every nation which embraces it. 

1 [As regards the hollow and unprogressive character of Turkish civilisa- 
tion, cf. Newman's Lectures on the Turks, Lect. iv. " Barbarism and 
Civilisation."] 



LECTUKE II 

THE DUTY OF CHRISTIAN NATIONS TO THE HEATHEN, AND 
ITS GREAT HINDRANCE. 

~TTT"E are met Here by an objection which requires to 
* * be disposed of. I will state it in the words 
of a high authority on the subject of ethnology : " Do 
not deceive yourselves ; every nation has its own reli- 
gion. Catholicity was and is impossible. The German, 
the Italian, and the Greek have and always had differ- 
ent religions, because they are different nations. We 
should not speak of Christianity so much as of Chris- 
tian nations, and of each of these in particular, for it is 
the national mind which really apprehends and inter- 
prets the message according to its capacity." It is true 
that the author of this passage belongs to a people with 
whom religion and nationality are so completely iden- 
tified that the one covers and sustains the other, and 
neither can exist apart. But his view is contradicted 



Duty to the Heathen and its Hindrance. 2 1 

by the whole course of Christian history, and not only 
Christianity but Mahometanism has the character of a 
world-wide religion, destined to embrace many and 
diverse nationalities. Turks, Arabians, and Persians are 
as unlike each other as any three nations on about the 
same level of civilisation well can be, and yet all these 
have the same religion ; and are not the Scotch and Swiss 
Protestants of wholly different nationality though they 
have the same religion ? There is only so much truth 
in the view in question, that, in the first place, there 
are nations whose moral and spiritual condition is so 
deplorably low, that they have no aptitude for a spiritual 
religion like the Christian. Such, for instance, are the 
Papuas of New Holland, those most wretched -and 
apparently most hopelessly degraded of human beings, 
on whom the labours of missionaries for long years have 
been wasted. It is true, secondly, that a religion which 
has once got possession of a nation interpenetrates, and 
in a sense transforms, the national character, and thus 
no doubt brings out differences, the cause of which 
might be confounded with the effect, if it were to be 
deduced from the original character of the people, 
whereas it is really the result of a religious faith received 
from without. It must further be admitted, that how- 



22 Reztnion of the Chttrches. 

ever close the similarity of views and Church organiza- 
tion, the apprehension and practice of a religion will 
vary widely according to national temperament, and 
these differences will not be removed or equalized by 
the mere fact of two nations belonging to the same 
great Church. Thus, for instance, a German Catholic, 
suddenly transported to Calabria, and master of the 
language, would find it difficult to realize that he and 
his neighbours possessed the same religion, so strange 
would the materialistic and magical distortion of Chris- 
tianity appear to him. When, again, he first came in 
contact with the religious notions and practices of a 
baptized Indian in South America, what violence would 
he have to do to his feelings before he could realize 
that they both professed the same faith ; while, on the 
other hand a married pair in Germany, of whom one is 
a believing Catholic and the other a believing Protes- 
tant, can carry on domestic worship and Bible-reading 
together for years in perfect harmony. 

It cannot then be denied that the great Christian 
powers have a call and a duty to extend to the 
heathen nations under their dominion, or within the 
sphere of their influence, the benefits of civilisation. 
For even those nations which are really cultivated, and 



Duty to the Heathen and its Hindrance. 23 

possess a literature, art, and a kind of civilisation of 
their own, such as the Chinese and Japanese, are not, 
properly speaking, civilized, for they want that humaniz- 
ing which a morality based on the laws of righteousness 
and love to man can alone supply, and that depends on 
religion. There is therefore only one kind of civilisa- 
tion, which is the product of the Christian spirit, and 
those nations alone possess a genuine civilisation 
which have passed under the discipline of the Christian 
Church, and are still learning in that school. The 
antithesis to this is barbarism ; and it is no paradox, but 
a notorious fact, that cultivated nations such as those 
named just now are at the same time barbarous. Even 
in the bosom of Christian civilisation there must be 
a constant struggle against the symptoms threatening, 
either from above or below, a relapse into barbarism. 
The gravity of the danger has just been exemplified in 
the frightful tragedy of the Paris Commune, and what 
is connected with it all over Europe. And therefore 
what has been called the internal or domestic mission 
of Europe must be as carefully attended to as the 
external mission to the heathen ; indeed, the former is 
the more pressing and indispensable of the two. 

But here I must explain more precisely what I under- 



24 Reunion of the Churches, 

stand by civilisation, and what I mean by the duty 
incumbent on the great Christian states and nations, 
first towards themselves, and then towards the heathen 
world. Our whole social order, every public and private 
institution or mode of life, rests, or should rest, on the 
following truths : — Before God all men are equal, all 
are called to the highest attainable moral and spiritual 
perfection, and thence to happiness, and all should love 
one another as brothers ; there should be no castes and 
no slavery. Every man is a free person, not to be 
treated as a means or a thing, but as an end in himself. 
There must therefore be a free development and expres- 
sion of all powers and capabilities, and legal right of 
exercising them, limited by due regard for the common 
liberty of all. Marriage is an institution consecrated by 
religion on the basis of monogamy and the equal rights 
of the wife. The father's right over his children is 
limited and controlled by society, whence child-murder 
is prohibited, and the State compels parents to provide 
for the training and education of their children. Labour 
and chastity are recognised as moral and religious duties, 
and the relation of the civil power to its subjects as 
consecrated by religion, so that obedience to law, and 
lawful authority as ordained by God, becomes a duty, 



Duty to the Heathen and its Hindrance. 2 5 

as it is also a duty for authority to keep within lawful 
limits, without arbitrary caprice or tyranny. 

It is the contrary of these ideas and conditions which 
meets us everywhere in the non-Christian world, 
whether Buddhist, Brahminical, or Mahometan. Above 
all, there is everywhere child-murder, especially of 
female children, and that too practised by the mothers 
themselves. The woman is a being of lower grade, so 
that throughout the East it is commonly supposed that 
only men have souls, and accordingly women are op- 
pressed, maltreated, shut out from all means of educa- 
tion, bought and sold like merchandise, and surrendered 
to the arbitrary caprice of men like slaves or beasts of 
burden ; and thence comes the system of polygamy, 
so fatal wherever it is tolerated, and the dissolution of 
family life which is inseparable from it. Everywhere, 
too, a disesteem of human life prevails, which is often 
wantonly lavished to a frightful extent. 

It is an oppressive thought that from four to five 
hundred millions belong to a religion like the Buddhist, 
which connects with the doctrine of transmigration of 
souls that of the " Nirvana," holding forth to man as 
his supreme end a condition of passive and otiose 
unconsciousness, and commending to him, as the truest 



26 Reunion of the Chttrches. 

and highest virtue, the negation of activity, will, desire, 
or thought. And where Buddhism ends Brahminism 
begins, in whose meshes are held between 130 and 140 
million Hindus. Here we have a gross Pantheism, 
with a worship that takes the form of the most indis- 
criminate idolatry ; the crudest arrogance and pre- 
sumption in the Brahmins, combined with the utmost 
contempt of man in the case of the lower castes. A 
cow is more honoured than a Sudra, and a Pariah 
can be murdered with impunity ; there are" no rights 
of man, but only of caste. 

And now let us take a glance at those nations 
whose position in the world entails on them the 
care of the portion of mankind which stands in 
grievous need of help. There is England, whose 
empire on the Ganges has been established for a cen- 
tury, and now embraces all Hindustan, which on the 
whole rules with a wisdom, justice, and clemency of 
which history records few examples. There is Eussia, 
whose giant arms embrace the whole of Northern, 
Western, and Eastern Asia ; and France, to which 
Northern Africa belongs. And what happened to Eng- 
land in the East Indies is happening to both of them : 
they will be driven on from conquest to conquest. 



Duty to the Heathen and its Hindrance. 2 7 

Eussia especially cannot stand still ; she must become 
more and more the arbiter of the destiny of North and 
Middle Asia. Does she possess the capacities for doing 
justice to this mission, the greatest and most difficult 
which can be imposed on any nation or state ? England 
has proved her capacity ; Eussia is still at the begin- 
ning of the great work assigned to her, and has to show 
that she is equal to the task, and understands not only 
how to conquer, but how to rule and civilize. Is it 
not above all requisite that the Eussian Church should 
recognise in the overwhelming duties which are more 
and more pressing upon her every day, a motive for 
abandoning her old exclusiveness, and seeking, through 
union with other Churches, a renewal of her spirit and 
vigour, and greater versatility of powers ? 

England has bestowed on her Hindu subjects, 
late indeed, and in larger measure and more liberal 
sense since 1829, all the privileges of her own higher 
culture and civil order, so far as the people are capable 
of receiving them ; there are now numerous universities 
and schools of every sort there, widow-burning and 
exposure of children is forbidden, the administration 
of justice is organized, the exclusiveness of castes will 
not be able to hold its ground much longer, countless 



28 Reunion of the Churches. 

newspapers and magazines find a large circle of readers. 
•But all this will not suffice to give the millions of India 
what they chiefly need — a great moral purification and 
improvement. The inspiring breath of religion can alone 
effect that. The Christian missions there have accom- 
plished very little in proportion to their efforts and the 
greatness of their task, and have scarcely stirred the 
surface of the vast slough of heathenism. Not only 
in Hindustan ; the three hundred years of Catholic 
and the fifty years of Protestant missions are rich in 
examples of admirable devotion, persevering energy, 
and heroic self-sacrifice ; noble martyr blood has 
flowed in streams, and flows still every year. But 
when we ask for the result of so many sacrifices, and 
so vast an apparatus, we are disappointed, and can 
hardly help feeling that the distinguished powers which 
would have produced such rich fruits at home have 
been wasted abroad on sterile soil. It is true that 
many Indian tribes, whose conversion seemed finally 
achieved, have died out and left no trace, in spite of 
their Christianity. The once flourishing missions of 
the Jesuits in North America and Paraguay have long 
since expired. Even among the cultivated races of 
India, in Camboja, Siam, and Burmah, only a few 



Duty to the Heathen and its Hindrance. 29 

thousand converts have been won by the missionary 
labour of above a thousand years ; and, moreover, the 
Indian Christians have the reputation of getting bap- 
tized for interested motives, and easily falling away. 
It is, above all, .one of the rarest things to find a per- 
manent settlement of heathen converts with a native 
priesthood. As to the Protestant missions, their own 
friends admit that only a tiny fraction of the heathen 
population has as yet been, I do not say actually con- 
verted, but even prepared for conversion, and that if 
the apparatus and energies employed are measured by 
the results, an unfavourable judgment must be formed 
of the missionary work altogether. 

Our surprise is diminished when we discover, on 
looking into the narratives of missionaries and travellers, 
how the European Christians carry with them every- 
where their divisions and sectarian spirit ; how, for 
instance, in East India, twenty different churches and 
sects are labouring at the conversion of the Hindus, 
each endeavouring to encroach upon the rest, destroy 
their settlements, and gain over their proselytes. And 
what is true there is true equally elsewhere, so that 
Christianity presents itself to the intelligent heathen 
under the repulsive aspect of division and uncertainty. 



30 Reunion of the Churches. 

In Tahiti, the French Government years ago took pos- 
session of the Protestant missions and handed them 
over to French Catholic emissaries. We know how 
dear this arbitrary procedure cost the Government of 
Louis Philippe, on account of the pecuniary indemnifi- 
cation paid to the English missionary Pritchard, which 
was so cried out against in France. In Madagascar, 
the emissaries of the rival Churches, Catholic and Pro- 
testant, brought matters to such a pass that King 
Eadema oscillated for a year between them, and when 
he was murdered each party charged the other with the 
crime, and the mutual hatred and endeavours to sup- 
plant one another still continue. In 1845 the Pro- 
testant missionaries were ejected from Fernando Po by 
the Spaniards, who laid claim to the island. That is 
the spectacle presented by Christians to the gaze of the 
heathen world. Christ says that every kingdom divided 
against itself shall be destroyed. We understand the 
failure of missionaries. And that is not all. What 
is to Christians the holiest and most venerable of all 
places, the birth-land of our faith, where Christ taught, 
lived, and suffered, is now the meeting-place of Churches 
that hate one another. Greeks, Eussians, Latins, Arme- 
nians, Copts, Jacobites, Protestants of various sects, all 



Duty to the Heathen and its Hindrance. 3 1 

have there their fortresses and entrenchments, and are 
intent on making fresh conquests for the rival Churches. 
To the shame of the Christian name, Turkish soldiers 
have to interfere between rival parties of Christians, 
who would else tear one another to pieces in the holy 
places, and the Pasha holds the key of the Holy 
Sepulchre. The strife between Latins and Greeks for 
the possession of the chapel in 1852 was the imme- 
diate occasion of the Crimean war. 

Truly every one who values the name of Christian 
should daily pray to God for a fresh outpouring of the 
Spirit of Unity, that we may keep a new Pentecost of 
enlightenment, peace, and brotherly love. 



LECTUKE III 

DIVISION OF EAST AND WEST : GROUNDS OF HOPE. 

~TTT"HEN we speak of the hopes of reunion of sepa- 
' * rated Churches, it is obvious that the first point 
to be thought of is to prepare the way for a better 
understanding, for taking counsel together, and for dis- 
covering eirenic explanations of the existing confessions 
of faith. The first thing is to distinguish dogma from 
opinion, traditional doctrine from the artificial products 
of theology, use from abuse, to remove well-grounded 
causes of scandal, and to restore what has become cor- 
rupted to its original form. Two divided Churches can- 
not rush at once into each other's arms, like two friends 
meeting after a long separation. And we see what 
infinite difficulty a single difference in doctrine may 
occasion, and how it may frustrate the most various 
and well-meant endeavours, in the separation of the 
Lutheran and Eeformed Churches, which is not yet 



Division of East and West. 33 

by any means wholly got rid of, notwithstanding the 
grand union between them. 1 There is needed a power- 
ful and dominant spirit of union, such as is not often 
found in the course of centuries, and a common con- 
trolling principle independent of individual caprice. 
Above all, the union of Churches is only then possible, 
when a high measure of mental culture is found in 
connexion with religious intelligence and zeal. From 
a lower intellectual standpoint differences of rite and 
ceremonial are regarded as questions on which salva- 
tion hinges, and instead of quiet and peaceful inquiry 
men rush to arms. Among Mahometans almost all 
differences have been decided by the sword, the restora- 
tion of unity meant the conquest and extermination 
of a sect; and thus religious wars have lasted for 
centuries among them down to quite recent times. 
Among Christians religious wars have been chiefly 
carried on when great moral corruption turned religious 
zeal into fanaticism, as in the Albigensian wars in the 
south of Trance, and the later contests there between 
Protestants and Catholics. 

1 [The Lutheran and Keformed (or Calvinistic) Churches of Germany were 
united by Frederick- William Hi. of Prussia in 1817, under the name of the 
" Evangelical Church " (Evangelische Kirche), which is still the Protestant 
State Church. But the union was only partially successful. See Krum- 
lnacher's Autobiography, pp. 95, 96.] 



34 Reunion of the Churches, 

If we look round among the nations to see where 
there is any disposition to take part in the work of 
pacification, we must put aside the Eomance nations, 
Spanish, Italian, and even French, partly on account 
of their religious indifference, partly because of their 
exclusive devotion to political questions and interests ; 
and because too they do not feel the sting of separation, 
from belonging entirely, or almost entirely, to one 
Church. Nor can we look to North America, where the 
sectarian spirit is still in full bloom, and the passion 
for division is so widely spread. "With the Slavonic 
peoples the national sentiment is just now prepon- 
derant, and forces higher religious considerations into 
the background. There remain England and Germany. 

In England the friends of union are a numerous and 
daily increasing body. The whole movement of the 
Oxford school, which has been advancing for the last 
thirty-five years — what used to be called " Puseyism," 
and is now called "Kitualism" — is essentially, and 
for the most part consciously, directed to union with 
the Western Catholic and the Eastern Churches. 1 
But, on the other hand, the sharply defined Protestant 

1 For some years past [since 1863] a magazine expressly devoted to this 
object has been published in England, — the Union Review. 



Division of East and West. 35 

spirit and antipathy as well to Eonie as to everything, 
whether in creed or ritual, that exceeds the bare letter 
of Scripture, is nowhere more deeply rooted in the 
popular mind than in England. This Calvinistic spirit, 
as it may well be termed, is peculiarly powerful in the 
great communities of Baptists, Congregationalists, and 
"Wesleyans, and reacts from them on the members of 
the Established Church. And there must be a funda- 
mental change in the condition of the Established 
Church itself, if it means to deal with the question of 
union in earnest; it must abandon its position as a 
State Church, which makes it at once too narrow and 
too broad, too lax and too stiff, too free in one sense 
and too dependent in another. 

And so we come to Germany. In the German 
Empire the Catholics now form one-third, the Pro- 
testants two-thirds of the population. If we count the 
Austrian provinces, the two Churches are about equal 
in numbers. This situation is peculiar to us Germans 
among all nations. Only the two great neighbouring 
countries of Holland and Switzerland exhibit a some- 
what similar phenomenon. In every other nation one 
Church, whether Eoman Catholic, Greek Catholic, or 
Protestant, immensely preponderates, if it does not 



36 Reunion of the Churches. 

prevail alone. But we have suffered so unspeakably 
from this religious division, which pierces through the 
body of the nation like a sharp sword, and our weak- 
ness, dismemberment, and humiliation, stand in such 
close relation of cause and effect to our division of 
Churches, that the belief is constantly forcing itself on 
every German familiar with the history of his country, 
that where the religious split began and the schism 
originated, there the reconciliation must follow, and the 
division must lead to a higher and better unity. That 
would be the tragical expiation in the great drama of 
our history. 

Meanwhile the numerical proportion of the members 
of different Churches is not the main point. Far more 
important is the relative proportion of powers and 
capabilities which can neither be counted nor weighed ; 
and this leads to the observation that in Germany the 
overwhelming preponderance, or rather domination/in 
science and literature, is on the Protestant side. Our 
belles-lettres, and nearly all our scientific literature, if 
we except some medical works, is almost entirely Pro- 
testant. In theology especially the disproportion is so 
great that the Protestant theology is at least six times 
richer than the Catholic in quantity and quality. The 



Division of East and West. 37 

main cause of this is unquestionably to be found in 
the former condition of the Catholic schools and uni- 
versities; in the oppressive Latin influence, fatal to 
intellectual life, which lay like a dead weight on the 
culture and education of Catholic countries, and the 
defective character of the schools intrusted to a foreign 
and essentially un-German Order, which through its sys- 
tematic neglect and contempt of the German language, 
its inadequate classical teaching and its formal method, 
failed to implant in its scholars either the capacity or 
the materials of thought, either style or power of expres- 
sion, thirst for knowledge, or perseverance in seeking it. 
For two centuries and a half this state of things con- 
tinued, and its consequences are still constantly felt. 
However, for the object we are now considering, the 
reconciliation of the Churches, this inferiority of one 
side might tell favourably, and almost be reckoned a 
gain. Tor when the end in view is to unite those 
who are divided, it is essential that at least one party 
should be conscious of its own deficiencies, and desirous 
of sharing the benefits and privileges of the other. 

The present state of things in Germany is this : Catho- 
lics and Protestants are united by community of speech, 
literature, manners, laws, and administration of justice, 



38 Reunion of the Churches, 

— by everything, in short, which binds men together, — 
while the gulf between them in Church matters is far 
wider than that which separates Catholics from members 
of the Eusso-Greek Church. The Protestants have often 
wished and sought for reunion with the Catholic Church 
of the West ; but there has been only one attempt on 
their part, almost immediately abandoned, to come to 
an understanding with the Eastern Church, when, in 
1575, the Tubingen theologians entered into negotia- 
tions with Jeremiah, Patriarch of Constantinople. But 
a comparison of their respective confessions then led 
both parties to the conclusion that the doctrinal and 
ecclesiastical differences were too great for any union 
to be effected. Nor could even the transfer of the 
Protestant Baltic provinces and their university to 
Eussia produce any change in this cool, self-sufficient, 
and exclusive way of looking at the question. But 
this cannot continue, and it is certainly indispensable 
for members of the Latin Catholic Church, as soon as 
they enter into conciliatory negotiations with Protes- 
tants, never to act without reference to the Eastern 
Church, or, still better, in concert with its members ; 
or else the attempt to bridge over one chasm might help 
to widen and deepen another no less deplorable and 



Division of East and West. 39 

displeasing to God. And to leave out the English 
Church from our attempts would be to drop a link no 
less indispensable than precious in the chain we are 
seeking to reunite. 

But we cannot undertake the healing of a schism 
without first having a clear view of its original causes 
and subsequent course. Let us begin with the older 
split. How and why was the Christian East divided 
from the West ? 

In the earlier centuries the distinction of Eastern 
and Western Churches simply meant a distinction in 
geographical site and language, and hence later on they 
came often to be called the Greek and Latin Church. 
As Christianity passed from East to West, all Christian 
documents and writings were for a long time — till 
towards the end of the second century — composed in 
Greek only, and even in Eome the Greek language 
prevailed for a considerable time among Christians. 
Thus did the Eastern portion of the Church for a long 
time enjoy a complete intellectual superiority; the 
Westerns had to learn from their Greek co-religionists, 
and to receive from them their ecclesiastical and 
theological education. All Latin theological literature 
before St. Augustine is in substance the application or 



4-0 Reunion of the Churches. 

imitation of Greek models. From the fourth century 
the Bishop of Constantinople advanced more and more 
to the headship of the whole Eastern Church ; and the 
strength, life, and learning of the Church became more 
and more concentrated in this imperial metropolis. 
Eome vainly sought to reduce the dignity of the 
Bishops and Patriarchs of New Eome, as it was called ; 
it was too completely involved in the circumstances of 
the Greek Empire, and too well adapted to the needs 
of the Eastern countries and Churches, and became so 
indispensable when the other great Sees of Alexandria, 
Antioch, and Jerusalem had fallen under Moslem 
dominion, and their Churches were gradually disappear- 
ing. After the northern migration each Church went 
its own way ; the union between Eome and Constan- 
tinople, often interrupted by quarrels, was always 
restored after a longer or shorter interval, but the 
alienation increased. The other Western Churches 
in Italy, France, England, Spain, and Germany had no 
direct relations with the East. The establishment of 
the Carlovingian and afterwards of the German Empire, 
was regarded at Constantinople as an usurpation and 
violation of the rights of what claimed to be the sole 
legitimate representative of the ancient Eoman Empire. 



Division of East and West. 4 1 

Moreover, many Roman rites began more and more to 
vary from the Eastern form, as in the rise of unleavened 
bread in the Eucharist, and afterwards in the with- 
drawal of the chalice, and disuse of immersion in 
Baptism. The most important point of difference was 
the addition of Filioque to the common creed, forced 
by the Franks on Eome after long resistance, whence 
sprang the controversy about the Procession of the 
Holy Ghost, which has lasted to this day. 

Yet it was not till quite the middle of the twelfth 
century, notwithstanding all the soreness and growing 
alienation on both sides, that communion between the 
Churches was broken off. But the Crusades, the acts 
of violence perpetrated by the Latins who often be- 
haved insolently to the weaker Greeks, and above all 
the new system of papal absolutism, to which even 
the Byzantine Emperors were now expected to suc- 
cumb, all conspired to make a public and complete 
breach inevitable. Then, in 1204, a crusading army 
conquered Constantinople and the greatest part of the 
Empire, and established a Latin Empire there, which 
the Popes took under their guidance and protection. 
The whole Eastern Church was to be Latinized, and a 
complete system of ecclesiastico -political tyranny was 



42 Reunion of the Churches. 

organized — a yoke which seemed utterly intolerable to 
the Greeks, and produced a deep hatred against the 
Westerns, especially against Eome, that survived for 
centuries. The seizure and sacking of the capital 
followed, with circumstances of horrible atrocity and 
profanation of churches, and then the split both in 
feeling and in fact was consummated; — in fact, by 
Innocent ill. arbitrarily imposing Latin Bishops on the 
Greek Churches, and thereby declaring all Easterns 
heretics and schismatics. Within sixty years (in 1261) 
the Latin Empire again fell, and with it fell the 
violently imposed Latin hierarchy. But the restored 
Greek Empire was weak and imperilled. The hostility 
of the West, especially of the Popes, had to be bought 
off at any price ; and so the Emperor let Pope 
Gregory arrange the terms of union as he pleased at 
the Council of Lyons in 1274. But to carry it out was 
impossible in the face of universal opposition, and with 
the Emperor's death the work fell to pieces. A new 
union was effected a hundred and sixty years later at 
Florence, which again was simply a work of necessity 
and compulsion. The Empire had fallen, with the 
exception of the capital ; all else w T as in the hands of 
the Turks, who were preparing to strike the last blow, 



Division of East and West. 43 

and it was thought that the Pope alone, through his 
wealth and authority in the West, could avert it. After 
long negotiations, in which the Pope and his theologians 
yielded something, and the Greeks, under compulsion of 
their Emperor, reluctantly and insincerely submitted to 
the conditions imposed, the decree of union was drawn 
up, which has since then continued to be the test 
required by Eome of all Orientals and Eussians coming 
into her communion. But as the Greeks had only 
submitted under stress of necessity, the work fell to 
pieces in the next few years, and two Greek Councils 
condemned the Florentine decrees. 

Already, from the thirteenth century, the conviction 
had been gaining ground, both in East and West, that 
the great hindrance to union lay not in theological 
and ceremonial differences, but in the Eoman claims to 
dominion over Church and State. The Greek Church, 
relying on its tradition and rich ecclesiastical literature, 
and clinging tenaciously to all that had been established 
at the time of the great movements and definitions of 
the fourth and fifth centuries, was suddenly called 
upon, in the thirteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth, to 
accept a form of absolute monarchical Church-govern- 
ment for which there was no precedent or evidence 



44 Reunion of the Churches. 

in its former history and literature, which had been 
developed in the West first in the ninth and then in 
the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and there only on 
the strength of a long series of forgeries and inventions, 
by which the Western clergy had been deceived. The 
same means were now of course employed for circum- 
venting the Greeks. In Councils, in conferences, and 
in writings used against them, they were met with the 
same forged authorities, or with others constructed for 
their special benefit; but then the attempt proved 
generally a failure, for the learned Greeks, of whom 
there were always a considerable body, were too well 
informed and too familiar with the views of the ancient 
Charch. The only result of such attempts was an 
increased mistrust on the side of the Greeks, who got 
accustomed to reject every overture suspiciously, as an 
attack on the freedom of the Eastern Church and its 
loyal adherence to the traditional deposit. 

But meanwhile the great and growing Eussian 
Empire had become the centre of Greek Christianity, 
and the daughter Church of Eussia left a mere hono- 
rary primacy, without real power, to the mother 
Church on the Bosphorus and its Patriarch. For 
132 years, from 1588 to 1720, Eussia had a Patri- 



Division of East and West. 45 

arch of her own. 1 But in all points of doctrine and 
usage the Greek type was preserved unchanged. Just 
at the time of the erection of the Patriarchate began 
also the efforts of Eome and the Jesuits to bring 
about an union of the Churches in Poland, which 
then still included whole districts belonging to the 
Greek rite, in Lithuania and in Eussia. In Poland 
and Lithuania the attempt succeeded by means of the 
Bishops taken from noble Polish families. As all 
the externals of worship were left unchanged, and 
the question of the Filioque was unintelligible both to 
people and clergy, the union simply consisted in throw- 
ing off the Patriarch of Constantinople and submitting 
to the Pope. All this, however, was the work of force 
and intrigue, dictated by motives of policy and ambi- 
tion. The Lithuanians were to be completely separated 
from the Muscovite Empire, to which they were bound 
by ties both of race and religion. The antagonism 
between Eussia, which was constantly advancing, and 
Poland, which was constantly growing weaker and more 

1 [By an ukase of January 25, 1721, Peter the Great abolished the Patri- 
archate of Moscow, which had been established with the consent of the 
four Eastern Patriarchs, and substituted the " Most Holy Governing 
Synod " — the composition of which has been subsequently changed more 
than once— as the supreme authority in the Russian Church. To this 
change the Patriarch of Constantinople assented two years afterwards.] 



46 Reunion of the Churches. 

anarchical, has shaped the whole Church-history of the 
Slavonic world from the middle of the sixteenth cen- 
tury to this day. The attempt of the Poles to seat two 
impostors (the false Demetriuses) side by side on the 
Eussian throne sprang from the same origin ; they were 
to subjugate the Eussian Church to the Pope. The 
only result attained, after many persecutions and acts 
of sanguinary violence, was the internal split of the 
Polish nation. The nobles and higher clergy remained 
Uniate or Latin, while the people and the lower 
clergy were Greek, or at least ready and inclined to 
return to the Eussian or separate Greek Church. 
These unionist efforts conducted by the Jesuits, with 
their brutal tyranny, have had unforeseen consequences 
of world-wide import. They have led at once to the 
aggrandizement of Eussia and the downfall of Poland ; 
to the first, by inspiring the Eussian people with that 
crusading spirit or proud national feeling of " the world 
against us and we against the world," which taught 
them to regard every foreign war as a war of religion ; 
to the dissolution of Poland, because its religious 
divisions could not be healed, nor yet be pacified by 
the establishment of civil equality. Besides the system 
of elective monarchy and the anarchy and venality of 



Division of East and West 47 

its nobles, the chief cause of the destruction of Poland 
was religious dissent and the intervention of Eussia, 
when appealed to for the protection of its co-reli- 
gionists. From the time of Peter the Great Poland 
was dependent on the will of the Czar, and yet it pro- 
ceeded with an incomprehensible blindness to exclude 
its numerous non-Catholic citizens from all offices and 
posts, and to oppress them in other ways. A long 
series of religious wars, always carried on with horrible 
cruelty, extends through the later history of Poland, 
even over the first partition. 

The aggrandizement of Eussia since the middle of 
the seventeenth century had been mainly due to the 
Czars undertaking the charge of their foreign co-reli- 
gionists and seeking to draw them over to themselves. 
Catherine n. wished to reap the harvest sown by her 
predecessors during the last 130 years, and incorporate 
Poland, where it was possible, with the Eussian Em- 
pire. By the two partitions of 1772 and 1793, she had 
placed whole dioceses of the Uniate Church, including 
two in Galicia, and in 1796 several millions of Uniates, 
under Eussian rule. Prom that time forward it became 
a fixed aim of Eussian policy to abolish the union, and 
to bring back these millions — sometimes by gentle 



48 Reunion of the Churches. 

means, where necessary by violence — into the bosom of 
the Greek Church. The higher Polish clergy with the 
Jesuits had paved the way for this, by drawing over the 
nobility to the Latin rite against the former agreement, 
so that the people who had remained true to the Greek 
rite felt alienated from them even in religious matters. 
The clergy themselves had often Latinized, and thereby 
increased the confusion and division. And so it was 
easy for the Eussian government to dissolve the union 
in this kingdom divided against itself. The method 
adopted was to leave the people to choose whether to 
remain Latins or to return to the "Mother Church." 
They almost always chose the latter. Under the Czar 
Mcholas, up to 1839, there were two million Uniates 
in Eussia, but by an ukase of March 25 that year, 
they also were brought over to the national Church. 
And so at last of the great Uniate Church of the north, 
which once contained several millions, there is nothing 
left but a few poor fragments in the diocese of Ohelm. 
And Catherine understood well enough to whom she 
owed her chief successes in Poland ; when Clement xiv. 
suppressed the Jesuit Order, 1 she received them grate- 

1 [The Jesuit Order was suppressed by Clement xiv. (Ganganelli) in 
1773, and restored by Pius vu. in 1814, when some of its older members 
were still alive.] 



Division of East and West. 49 

fully as educators of the Polish nobility and counsellors 
of the Kings and Bishops who had played so effectively 
into the hands of Eussia. By her command the Order 
with its revenues continued to exist in her dominions. 

The long history of this union, this ecclesiastical 
tragedy, which had its beginning, middle, and end in 
violence, persecution, oppression, and bloodshed, and 
closed with the destruction of a once mighty kingdom, 
teaches us how a union of divided Churches is not to 
be effected. 

In Galicia, South Hungary, and Transylvania, there 
are still Uniate Churches, including together two 
millions and a half of souls. But everywhere the 
mixture of the Eoman and Greek rite, or the super- 
seding of the latter by the former, which a section of 
the clergy are always aiming at, causes disturbances 
and perplexity of conscience, and endangers the continu- 
ance of the union. 

In general, the Eastern Church has remained where 
it was when the two halves of Christendom were still in 
communion. Since then it has been disturbed by no 
important doctrinal controversies, and there has accord- 
ingly been no occasion for dogmatic definitions. Its 
theology has remained thoroughly patristic and tradi- 

D 



50 Reunion of the Churches. 

tional, keeping to the writings of the Fathers up to the 
seventh century, and practically closing with St. John 
of Damascus in the eighth, while the theological move- 
ment of the "West began in the ninth, culminated with 
the scholasticism of the thirteenth and fourteenth cen- 
turies, and then again in the sixteenth and seventeenth 
had to encounter its great adversary, the Protestant 
doctrine and theology. Even in the twelfth century, 
although there were many points in dispute between 
Eome and Constantinople, it was still the prevalent 
view that there was but one great universal Church, 
embracing East and West alike. The national hatred 
was great, but neither side dared to say this, " We alone 
are the Catholic Church, and you are excommunicated, 
apostate, heretical." Both sides appealed to the first 
seven or eight (Ecumenical Councils and their decrees, 
and held that fresh decisions binding the universal 
Church could only be enacted at such another Synod 
representing both East and West. And that is still 
the belief in the East and in Eussia. With this is 
connected the patriarchal theory, that there are five 
Presidents of the whole Church, four in the East and 
one in the West, namely, the Pope, to whom belongs the 
first rank, but no power or dominion over the rest. But 



Division of East and West. 51 

since the Pope has separated himself from the commu- 
nion of the rest, and put forward inadmissible claims to 
dominion, his place has been taken by the later Patri- 
archate of Moscow, and since 1720 by the Governing 
Synod of St. Petersburg which superseded it ; and if 
any controversy concerning the whole Church required 
settlement, it would be referred to the four Oriental 
patriarchs, and decided by their unanimous verdict. 

Thus it was that before 1854 the doctrinal differ- 
ences between East and West were very slight, but the 
differences in Church constitution, ritual, and worship 
were considerable. 

The insertion of the Filioque in the Nicene Creed is 
an offence to the Orientals, who say that the Latin 
Church alone had no right to make it, and that this 
ancient symbol must be maintained in the precise form 
fixed by the (Ecumenical Councils. The Popes allowed 
it to remain without the addition in the (Uniate) 
Eastern Churches. So again with Purgatory. All 
Oriental Churches rejected the notion of a purifying 
fire after death, and at the Council of Florence the Pope 
and his theologians consented to its being abandoned or 
left an open question, and the doctrine of the Church 
confined to the permission or recommendation of prayer 



5 2 Reunion of the Churches. 

for the dead. 1 No objection was ever made to the use 
of the chalice in the East, though the Popes persistently 
refused it to Western nations, or withdrew it after being 
once conceded, at the cost of rivers of blood and of 
the strengthening and extension of Protestantism. So 
again with the marriage of priests. The universal 
custom of Eussia and the East, that every secular priest 
should marry before ordination, was never assailed by 
the Popes, nor did they ever require the introduction of 
celibacy. It was out of regard for the Greek Church 
that at the Council of Trent no condemnation was 
pronounced on divorce for adultery, as an error, and the 
Council contented itself with vindicating the opposite 
practice of the Latin Church. 2 

As regards Baptism, which the Orientals perform by 

1 [This is all that is taught authoritatively now. The Council of Trent 
(Sess. xxv.) simply defines " Purgatorium esse, aniraasque ibi detentas 
fidelium suffragiis, potissimum vero acceptabili altaris sacrificio juvari," 
and forbids preachers to deal with subtle and difficult questions, which 
tend rather to curiosity and superstition than to edification. Perrone, the 
Jesuit Professor at the Boman College for the last thirty years, says 
accordingly, " Duo tantum ab Ecclesia de Purgatorio definita sunt, ejus- 
dem scilicet existentia, et suffragiorum utilitas erga defunctorum animas. 
Omnia proinde quae ad locum, tempus, pcenarum naturam et acerbitatem 
spectant, dogma non attingunt ; prout nee attingunt quae ad modum per- 
tinent, quo defunctorum animse suffragiis fidelium adjuvantur."— Prcelect. 
Theol. Parisiis, 1854, vol. i. pp. 478, 9. The Creek Synod of Bethlehem, 
held in 1672, on this, as on other points, virtually indorsed the teaching 
of Trent.] 

2 [Divorce a vinculo is not however allowed among the Uniates.] 



Division of East and West. 53 

immersion, while throughout the West, both Catholic 
and Protestant, affusion only is used, in Constanti- 
nople it was for some time the custom to reject Western 
"baptism and rebaptize converts. In Eussia, also, a 
Synod held in 1620, under the Patriarch Philaret, pre- 
scribed this rebaptism, but the Philaret of our own day 
observes that it was an order not to be justified by the 
doctrine of the Church, but excusable on account of 
the crimes of the age. 1 Latterly Constantinople has 
followed the advice of St. Petersburg, and abandoned 
the practice of rebaptizing, thereby admitting the 
validity of Western baptism. 

Even the official language of Eome used to speak not 
of heresy but only of schism, which had come to be 
termed the Photian Schism — an unhistorical designa- 
tion, for Photius, who came forward in the ninth cen- 
tury as the accuser of Eome and the West, did not 
effect any separation, and the mutual recognition and 
intercommunion of the Churches lasted two centuries 
longer. Indeed, as late as 1583, Pope Gregory XIII. 
addressed a friendly letter to Jeremiah, Patriarch of 
Constantinople, calling him his "venerable brother," 
and breathing no syllable about subjection or recanta- 

1 Philaret's Geschichte Russlands, trans, by Blumenthal, 1872, vol. ii. p. 98. 



54 Reunion of the Churches. 

tion of any doctrine, but only begging him to exert his 
authority for the reception of the new calendar in the 
East. 1 And the ecclesiastical acts of the separated 
Eastern Bishops and Priests have been acknowledged 
as valid in the West on the ground of their episcopal 
succession and ordination, as was distinctly shown at 
the Council of Florence, where neither the Pope nor 
his theologians maintained that they had lost their 
jurisdiction (or power of absolution) through separa- 
tion from Eome. 

The great stumblingblock and real hindrance to any 
understanding in the eyes of all Easterns is the Papacy, 
in the form which it has assumed according to the 
ultramontane theory, since the time of Gregory VIL, of 
an absolute spiritual and temporal dominion over the 
whole Christian world. Both Latins and Greeks said 
as much in the middle ages, and it is still openly 
avowed in our own day, as well by converts as by 
Eussians and Greeks themselves. 2 And now, through 
recent occurrences, every hope of reconciliation and 
future reunion has been purposely cut up by the roots. 
The present Pope has within the last few years imposed 

i See Theiner's Die Staatskirche Russlands, 1853, p. 47. 
2 Cf. e.g. Prince Augustine G-alizin's UEglise Grceco-Russe, Paris, 1861, 
p. 59. 



Division of East and West 5 5 

three new articles of faith — the Immaculate Conception, 
his Universal Episcopate, and his Infallibility. None 
of his predecessors for 1800 years, with one solitary 
exception, has done anything of the kind, and that one, 
Boniface vin., contented himself with a single dogma, 
and did not succeed in securing the acceptance of that. 1 
The whole traditions of the Eastern Church, its canon 
law and patristic literature, contain nothing in support 
of these doctrines, or capable of being brought into 
harmony with them. The forgeries employed to per- 
suade the Greeks to accept them have long since 
been seen through and exposed. 

In Eome the mind and temper of the Greeks and 
Eussians was perfectly well understood. It was known 
that on their principles this attempt to make new 
dogmas could only be regarded as a crime and a blas- 
phemy. The division can no longer, as before, be 
called a mere separation or schism ; the whole Eastern 
and Eussian Church, with its seventy-five millions, 
must now be declared heretical, and the Curia and 

1 [The author refers to the Bull Unam Sanctam, issued in 1302, defining 
that the spiritual and temporal swords are equally committed by God to 
the Roman Pontiff, and that it is absolutely essential to salvation for every 
human being to be subject to him. The Bull was publicly burnt at Paris, 
and Philip the Fair appealed to a future General Council. It was virtually 
withdrawn by Clement v. ] 



56 Reunion of the Churches. 

Jesuits must admit all the consequences that follow 
from that declaration. To speak any longer of hopes 
of a future union would border on madness. We can 
but assume that this was deliberately intended at Eome 
— entire separation for ever and for all eternity. But 
man proposes and God disposes. 

The Kussian people — viz., the thinking and active 
portion of them, who form public opinion — believe 
that two great tasks lie before them, one in Europe, 
the other in Asia. The latter is the strengthening 
and maintenance of Christianity, everywhere in Asia 
oppressed by Islam, and the restoration of a great 
Asiatic Eastern Church. The Privy Councillor Moura- 
vieff, a member of the Governing Synod, refers to this 
point when he says : — " We are thoroughly convinced 
that the famous Oriental Sees will recover their ancient 
splendour." 1 Indeed, the system of the Eussian and 
the whole Eastern Church requires that the three 
ancient Patriarchs of Alexandria, Antioch, and Jeru- 
salem, should again become in fact what they were 
formerly, and not be mere assessors of the Patri- 
arch of Constantinople. In Europe it is the idea 
of Panslavism which shapes the thought of young 

1 Question Religieuse d? Orient et d' Occident, p. 97. 



Division of East and West. 5 7 

Russia, the ruling and acting Russia of the future. 
And not there only, but throughout Eastern Europe, 
this notion or hope is strongly leavening the popular 
mind, into which it sinks deeper every day. Yet the 
object aimed at, whether it be the moral or political 
union of all Slavonic peoples, or of the ten principal 
cognate races, which comprise together some eighty 
millions, has no historical basis, and has never before 
found expression or sympathy. Eor the first time, 
in our own day, some Bohemian scholars, who had 
advanced from linguistic to historical investigations, 
discovered that all these nationalities united by a com- 
mon primitive language sprung from a common stock. 
It was a natural inference from this in Russia, that the 
Russian nation itself, comprising fifty-four millions of 
the eighty million Slaves, was called to the hegemony 
of the race. When the question is regarded from an 
ecclesiastical point of view, we find that over two-thirds, 
or fifty-six millions, of the Slaves belong to the Greek 
Church, nineteen millions to the Roman Catholic, three 
millions to the Uniate, and about a million and a half 
are Protestants. And thus the Panslavist idea natur- 
ally points to the formation of a great united Slavonic 
Church, in which seventy-eight million Slaves might be 



58 Reunion of the Churches. 

religiously welded together through a union of Latins 
and Easterns. Even now, a letter of the Czech his- 
torian and leader, Palacky, to the Eussian spokesman 
of Panslavism, Pogodin, is going the round of the 
daily papers. 1 Palacky salutes him as "the reawakener 
and apostle of the happy idea of Slavonic national 
union," and adds, " Praise and thanks to the all- 
merciful God, who has blessed your labours and mine. 
The Slavonic national spirit has waked up from the 
slumber of centuries ; the sentiment of common fel- 
lowship is constantly gaining ground in all Slavonic 
countries. The ultimate triumph of the cause we, who 
are both old, may leave with confidence to the rising 
generation." That younger generation will soon dis- 
cover, if it has not discovered already, that, with the 
mass of the people, no community of mind and senti- 
ment, such as is aimed at, is possible without an union 
of Churches. The Czechs may consult the Eussians 
about that. 

Since the time of Alexander n. a powerful move- 
ment has penetrated the Eussian Church. It feels 
itself to be the chief representative and leader of the 
Eastern Church, so venerable for its age, its unbroken 

1 See Wiener Neue Freie Presse, 10 Feb. 1872. 



Division of East and West. 59 

succession, and its immutability. Even the indepen- 
dent Church of the kingdom of Greece is stirring, and 
in the South and Eussian North alike an ecclesiastical 
literature is rapidly growing up. Foreign, and espe- 
cially German literature, is read and studied. Several 
young men in Greece have received their theological 
training at German universities. And at the same 
time energetic efforts are being made in the Eussian 
Church to secure the reforms which are urgently needed. 
It is perceived that the whole position of the clergy, the 
feud between the white and black clergy — the seculars 
and parish priests on one side, and the monks and 
bishops, who are taken from their ranks, on the other 
— and the want of preaching and popular instruction, 
are matters requiring radical change. This is not only 
felt but openly asserted ; and those who remember the 
days of the Emperor Nicholas cannot but be astonished 
at the advances made since then. And this Church is 
able to correct any past mistake or error, as has been 
done in the case of rebaptism, even should it affect 
the decree of a Council. She is not compelled by her 
principles, on the ground of any fancied infallibility, 
always to drag her errors after her like a ball fastened 
to her heel. And accordingly there is ground for the 
fairest hopes in that quarter of the Christian world. 



LECTUKE IV. 

THE GERMAN REFORMATION. 

nriHEEE are not many years in the world's history 
where two eventful pages come so close together 
as on March 16 and November 1, 1517. On the former 
day the fifth Lateran Council at Eome was closed after 
several years' session, and thereby the last hope of 
any reform of the Church from above was laid in the 
grave. That assembly of Italian bishops had but one 
object, to extend the power of the Pope, and make any 
independent reforming Council, like the Council of 
Basle, impossible for the future. 1 Seven months later 
Luther's theses were posted up at Wittemberg, and the 
contest began which, after 350 years, is still unfinished. 

1 [The fifth Lateran Synod was opened by Julius n. in 1512, and dis- 
solved in 1517 by Leo x. It consisted of some fifty or sixty Italian bishops 
only, and has never been received as oecumenical, nor did even ultramon- 
tane writers, till quite lately, venture to affirm its cecumenicity with any 
confidence ; Bellarmine and Muzzarelli, e.g. speak very doubtfully. Its 
principal achievements were the abolition of the Pragmatic Sanction, and 
the assertion, in the Bull Pastor JEternus, of the superiority of Popes to 
Councils, in direct contradiction to the famous decrees of Constance.] 
60 



The German Reformation. 61 

The Eeformation was a movement so deeply rooted 
in the needs of the age ; and sprang so inevitably from 
the ecclesiastical conditions of the centuries immedi- 
ately preceding, that it took possession of all the nations 
of the West in turn. So powerfully did it sway men's 
minds in Italy, the native home of the Papacy, that 
Paul iv. declared the Inquisition, with its dungeons and 
blazing pyres, to be the only sure and firm support of 
the Papacy there. In Italy and Spain, however, it was 
found possible to crush the movement, though only at 
a frightful sacrifice of human life ; but in Germany it 
sank so deep into the heart of the nation that even such 
a tribunal as the Spanish Inquisition would have failed 
to achieve the task. 

This force and strength of the Eeformation was only 
in part due to the personality of the man who was its 
author and spokesman in Germany. It was Luther's 
overpowering greatness and wonderful many-sidedness of 
mind that made him the man of his age and his people. 
Nor was there ever a German who had such an intui- 
tive knowledge of his countrymen, and was again so com- 
pletely possessed, not to say absorbed, by the national 
sentiment, as the Augustinian monk of Wittemberg. 
The mind and spirit of the Germans was in his hand 



62 Reunion of the Churches. 

what the lyre is in the hand of a skilled musician. He 
had given them more than any man in Christian days 
ever gave his people — language, popular manuals of 
instruction, Bibles, hymnology. All his opponents 
could offer in place of it, and all the reply they could 
make to him, was insipid, colourless, and feeble, by the 
side of his transporting eloquence. They stammered ; 
he spoke. He alone has impressed the indelible stamp 
of his mind on the German language and the German 
intellect, and even those among us who hold him in 
religious detestation, as the great heresiarch and seducer 
of the nation, are constrained, in spite of themselves, to 
speak with his words and think with his thoughts. 

And yet still more powerful than this Titan of the 
world of mind was the yearning of the German people 
for deliverance from the bonds of a corrupted Church 
system. Had no Luther arisen Germany would not 
have remained Catholic. We may gather that from the 
enthusiastic sympathy, especially in South Germany, 
for the doctrine of the Anabaptists. This doctrine, 
which emanated from the lowest ranks, was zealously 
attacked by the whole body of theologians. It was 
essentially distinguished from Luther's teaching, whose 
favourite dogma of justification by faith alone it re- 



The German Reformation. 63 

jected. But many laid down their lives for this form 
of belief, and if the princes had not hastily combined to 
strangle the movement, which was not only religious, 
but political and social, in the blood of its adherents, 
Germany would probably have been divided, not, as 
afterwards happened, between Lutherans and Zwing- 
lians, but between Anabaptists and Lutherans. For 
the Eeformed (Zwinglian) doctrine was never popular 
in Germany ; it was a mere exotic growth, artificially 
fostered by the princes, and was generally only endured 
under compulsion. 

Luther had one very powerful ally besides the national 
sympathy, and that was the Court of Eome itself. Had 
the Curia been advised by an astute disciple of the 
German Eeformer, he could hardly have given counsel 
more efficient or more profitable to his master than 
what was actually followed. At the first moment, 
the official theologian of the Curia, Sylvester Prierio, 
Master of the Sacred Palace, met Luther's appeal to the 
Bible with the assertion that the force and authority of 
Holy Scripture is derived entirely from the Pope. To 
censure anything done by Eome was heresy. Then, 
again, Leo x.'s Bull against Luther condemned as errors 
such universally familiar truths as that the best penance 



64 Reunion of the Chtcrckes. 

is reformation of life, and that it is against the charity 
of the Holy Ghost to burn heretics. If the indulgence- 
preachers told men that as soon as the money chinks in 
the chest the soul flies out of Purgatory, they preached 
to deaf ears. 

But if Luther and the other Eeformers painted in 
the darkest colours the deep corruption in the Church, 
the wretched management of ecclesiastical affairs, the 
crimes of the clergy, and the unspeakable misery 
of the people, so utterly neglected, deceived, and plun- 
dered by their pastors, all this was fully admitted 
on the other side. And more than this too : the 
Popes themselves could not deny — for it was too 
notorious — that Eome itself was the seat and source 
of corruption, and the Popes its authors and dissemi- 
nators. Adrian VI. had it openly proclaimed at the 
Diet of Nuremberg in 1522, that everything in the 
Church had been perverted, and a disease had spread 
from the head to the members, from the Popes to 
the rest of the rulers of the Church. 1 And what 
Adrian proclaimed in general, in accents of penitence, 
the Germans read in detail twelve years later in the 

1 [Adrian vi., a Netherlander, wlw> succeeded Leo x. in 1522, was a man 
of deep piety, but he reigned only one year. He was the last non- Italian 
Pope.] 



The German Reformation. 65 

famous memorial drawn tip at the command of Paul III. 
by nine Eoman prelates, including Caraffa, afterwards 
Paul it., where the theory invented by sycophants 
of the Pope's absolute dominion over the whole Church 
was characterized as the source of all this corrup- 
tion. 1 One member of the Commission, Cardinal Con- 
tarini, who was afterwards papal legate in Germany, 
expressly maintained the impiety of this doctrine, 
which made the Pope absolute lord and master of the 
whole Church, and defended Luther's work on the 
Babylonish Captivity, where the doctrine of Christian 
liberty is opposed to this tyrannical doctrine. 

What was communicated to the Emperor Charles V. 
as the wish and advice of the Pope, was mainly 
comprised in the request to put down the German 
movement by force of arms. The Legate Campeggio 
represented in 1530 that capital punishment and the 
establishment of the Inquisition in all German countries 

1 [Paul m. commenced his reign by summoning several distinguished 
men of reforming tendencies and devout life into the Sacred College, 
among whom were Contarini, Pole, Sadolet, Caraffa, and Giberto ; and 
they were encouraged to speak their opinions freely. See Eanke's Popes, 
vol. i. pp. 98 sqq. It was, however, through Caraffa's influence, who 
distrusted all gentler means of gaining over the Protestants, aided by the 
advice of Ignatius Loyola, that the Eoman Inquisition was established in 
1542, and he became one of the first and severest Grand Inquisitors. lb. 
pp. 141 sqq.] 

E 



66 Reunion of the Churches. 

would be the best remedy. 1 And when at last the 
Emperor took up arms, Paul III. sent an auxiliary force 
commanded by his nephews. And thus the feeling of 
hatred against Eome was so universal, that Marcellus II., 
when legate in Germany, wrote to Eome that nothing 
so filled him with fear and horror as the intense 
exasperation of a whole nation, which he everywhere 
encountered. 2 Even a Jesuit living in Eome, John 
Eaure, in 1750 felt obliged to acknowledge that the 
principal and indeed only cause of the separation of 
the Northern nations was, not at all their love for 
Lutheran and Calvinist doctrines, but their hatred of 
the Pope and Court of Eome, and this hatred was 
increased by the profligacy, pride, domineering, and 
covetousness of the clergy, especially of the religious 
orders. 3 

This too was remarkable and hard to explain, that 
after the famous Bull issued by Leo x. in 1520 against 
the earliest publications of Luther, the Popes refrained 
from any further dogmatic pronouncements. Europe 
was in a state of the extremest excitement, and the 

1 So thought Clement vn. according to Cardinal Loaysa. See Cartas 
al Emperador Carlos V. por su Confesor. Heine, Berlin, 1848. 

2 Cf. Anecdota Romana. 

8 Commentarium in Bullam Pauli III., 1750, p. 139. 



The German Reformation, 6 J 

whole religious edifice seemed tottering to its fall. The 
most discordant doctrines, in sharp antagonism to all 
previous teaching, were forcing their way to the front ; 
never had there been a period in all Christian history 
when the perplexity of men's minds was so great, and 
the people left to themselves so utterly helpless, as in 
the forty-three years from 1520 to 1563. Yet the Popes, 
according to the latest theory the sole infallible teachers 
of mankind, kept silence. Not a single doctrinal 
Bull of that whole period exists ; one whole generation 
was suffered to grow up in Europe, and another to 
pass to its grave, without knowing what the infallible 
chair in Eome bade them believe on the gravest reli- 
gious questions. German Bishops, like Faber in Vienna, 
made the most moving representations. The whole 
generation, he said, whose birth or youth coincided with 
the time of the great controversy, knew not what was 
the true religion, and if this continued men would 
become thoroughly godless and atheistical. 1 As late as 
1530 he wrote to the Pope that, if even then he would 
undertake the correction of abuses, there was great 
hope that all Germany, and indeed the whole Church, 
would be brought back to its earlier condition of 

1 Eaynaldus, Annal, Eccl. aim. 1536, p. 70. 



68 Reunion of the Churches. 

peaceful orthodoxy. 1 But all was in vain. The Popes 
persisted in their policy of silence, and of putting every 
obstacle in the way of the Council so anxiously looked for, 
until it was too late for its decrees to make the slightest 
impression on a generation that had been thoroughly 
imbued with Protestant views from childhood. 

And the German Church ? Where was it then, and 
how did it help itself? The Germans had still indeed 
a political unity — the Empire, with the Emperor and the 
Imperial Diet; and they had Bishops and dioceses. But 
there was wanting a higher organization of common life, 
— in a word, a German national Church. For centuries 
no German Council had been held, nor anything done 
to remedy even the grossest and most crying abuses. 
In truth, such a Council was hardly possible, and it is a 
significant fact that during the whole forty years of the 
Eeformation contest, neither the German episcopate, 
nor even any considerable portion of it, made a single 
attempt to take counsel in Synod on the religious situa- 
tion and the common measures to be adopted. There 
is scarcely a parallel case in all Church history, but it 
is explained by their conscious impotence. For since 
the dismemberment of the entire Church system through 

1 Kaynald. Annal. Eccl. ann. 1536, p. 54. 



The German Reformation, 69 

the Popes, the German Church lay on the ground like 
a helpless and motionless giant with fettered limbs. 

The whole conduct of the Popes from Clement VII. 
downwards, in regard to the constantly renewed peti- 
tions and requirements of the Emperor, the sovereigns, 
and the nations, as recent discoveries have revealed it to 
us, was one long series of evasions, intrigues, and false- 
hoods. Pius IV. himself declared without hesitation to 
the Venetian ambassador, that his predecessors had 
professed to wish for a Council, but had not really 
desired it. And he added, that if he wished after their 
example to give the mere appearance of a Council, he 
could keep the world occupied for three or four years 
at least with the question of when it should meet. 1 
Many may find it incomprehensible how, at a time 
when one nation after another was being swept into 
the movement, the authorities at Eome should have 
obstinately persisted in refusing what they must have 
themselves acknowledged to be just and right; but 
three causes conspired to produce this result. The first 
was the powerful and compact resistance of the whole 
entourage, of a Pope and his court, which profited by the 
abuses. The second cause lay in the diminution of 

1 Cf. Eeimarus, Forschungen zur deutschen Geschichte, pp. 594, 602. 



70 Reunion of the Churches. 

power which any reform must inevitably involve. For 
the development of the papal system, with its centra- 
lized bureaucracy and plenary power to meddle in 
everything, had sunk the Church in such deep degrada- 
tion that every removal of an abuse, every improvement 
in doctrine and discipline, would have been also a 
lessening or limitation of papal power. Lastly and 
chiefly, it was the supreme principle and soul of the 
whole Eoman system of ecclesiastical administration 
that made the Papacy hostile to all reform — the prin- 
ciple, namely, that a claim once preferred could never 
be abandoned, an error or injustice never publicly con- 
fessed, and therefore never remedied. Authority must 
remain inviolate, and can never be sufficiently exalted. 
This was pre-eminently the principle of the new Order 
of Jesuits, which now came to the assistance of the 
Papacy in its sore need. And this soon appeared in 
the great question of the use of the chalice, which the 
sovereigns, who in other respects were entirely opposed 
to Protestantism, were now urging, because they saw no 
other way of retaining their subjects in the ancient 
Church. But the Jesuits, Canisius especially, carried 
the day by insisting that the point at issue was the 
authority of the Church, meaning that of the Pope, for 



The German Reformation. 71 

which alone they cared. If any concession was made, 
how was the earlier conduct of the Popes to be excused, 
with the bloody wars and countless holocausts of human 
victims it had cost ? 

When we look closely into the circumstances of Ger- 
many during the period from 1520 to 1568, we perceive 
how the resistance of the old Catholic element became 
constantly feebler and the number of Catholics more 
limited, till at last the Protestant belief, like a mighty 
stream, swept everything before it. In a former work 
I have taken pains to discover all the German scholars 
who still adhered to the ancient Church, or would 
gladly have remained loyal to it, but it was a mere 
handful. In the reports of papal nuncios during thirty 
years we read that there were still many so-called 
" Expectants," who wished to remain undecided till a 
true Council pointed out to them the right way. We 
read how these nuncios were adjured and implored with 
tears by the highest personages, by princes, to impress 
on the conscience of the Pope the urgent necessity of 
at once convoking an QEcumenical or a German Council 
as the only available means of saving the Church. 
But, generally speaking, all the learning and culture 

1 Cf. Canisii Vita, p. 199. 



72 Reunion of the Churches. 

gravitated to the Protestant side, especially the influ- 
ential class of schoolmasters and humanists, and even 
the clergy. These last were still very numerous at the 
beginning of the movement, for the German Church was 
the wealthiest in the world. The endowed benefices 
were numberless ; even small towns had from thirty 
to forty priests, besides convents and monks, and we see 
these clergy going over in shoals to the Eeformation, 
or succumbing without the slightest resistance to the 
introduction of Protestantism. In those countries and 
cities where the new religion had been imposed by the 
civil authority or the magistrates, the Catholic clergy 
did not depart, as they easily might have done, but 
stayed where they were, partly in voluntary partly in 
involuntary subjection. Even the dissolution of the 
monasteries only converted the monks into Protestant 
preachers, or followers of some secular calling. And 
yet in South Germany there were hundreds of un- 
occupied parishes and empty monasteries, where the 
priests and monks ejected by the Eeformation would 
have been gladly welcomed and cared for, had they 
come. And this too at a time when all over Europe, 
in France, England, the Netherlands, Italy, Spain, 
fagots were blazing, and men preferred a fiery death to 
denying their faith. 



The German Reformation. 73 

In 1557 the Venetian ambassador, Badoero, who was 
well informed, reported that seven-tenths of the Ger- 
man nation had become Lutheran, and two-tenths 
belonged to other sects — the Eeformed and Anabaptist, 
— while only one-tenth remained Catholic. The greater 
part of Austria and Bohemia was Protestant, and in 
Bavaria, the nobility, and the Emperor Maximilian II. 
himself, though he continued nominally Catholic, were 
of the same religion. But since the end of the six- 
teenth and beginning of the seventeenth century, half 
Germany has gradually become Catholic again. This 
happened partly through the internal division of the 
Protestants and the litigious spirit of their divines, 
which produced disgust and painful uncertainty among 
the people, and led many to look on the rigid system 
of authority and uniformity of the ancient Church as 
preferable. But it was chiefly by the oppression and 
banishment of the Protestant ministers, the forced 
emigration of those who adhered to their faith, the 
destruction of Protestant Bibles, catechisms, and hymn- 
books, and generally the employment of all those 
means of coercion which the Jesuits had reduced to 
a system, that the so-called counter-Eeformation in 
Austria and Bavaria and the ecclesiastical principalities 
was brought about. 



74 Reunion of the Churches. 

But the notion of a permanent separation from the 
ancient Church had not occurred to the generation 
of the Eeformation era in Germany. It was only a 
reformation that was demanded ; it had been longed for 
and demanded for centuries before. The old dwelling- 
house was thought to require repairing and cleansing, but 
there was no intention of pulling it down and building 
a new one in its place. The idea of two rival Churches 
in Germany arrayed in permanent hostility against each 
other shocked the mind. All diets and religious con- 
ferences of the day were conducted on the assumption 
that the adherents of the new and the old religion were 
still members of one universal Church, and that a 
common understanding could and ought to be arrived 
at, and communion of worship restored. Even when 
the Augsburg religious treaty of 1555 established a 
legal and political separation, the Estates of the Empire 
consoled themselves and the nation with the hope of 
a future Council ; and as that could not be at ODce 
obtained, they thought another religious conference 
should be tried, when, as was said, " the truth would be 
brought to light." Two years later this conference was 
opened without any result at Worms. But still for a 
long time the separation continued to be regarded as a 



The German Reformation. 75 

temporary and provisional state of things, although it 
seemed as if the Tridentine decrees on the one side, and 
the Formulary of Concord 1 on the other, in their sharp 
antithesis must exclude all hope. Yet a century after 
the separation the hope of a future union was still 
clung to in the Articles of the Westphalian Peace, and 
the boundary-lines were fixed only until, " by the grace 
of God," a friendly settlement of the religious contro- 
versies was attained. 2 

With the year 1560, at the end of tiie reign of the 
Emperor Ferdinand I., a revolution began to work in 
Germany, and generally both in the Catholic and the 
Protestant camp, which could not fail to make even any 
approach to friendly negotiations more difficult, and 
seemed destined to make the breach perpetual. Among 
the German Protestants the long series of internal 
controversies was decided in a strictly Lutheran 
sense, and the building up of the Lutheran dogmatic 
system followed, — a theological codification studiously 
sharpening all the points of divergence from the 
ancient Church. It was based on the Formulary of 
Concord, which was not a common symbol like 

i [The Formula Concordicewas established in 1577, after Luther's death, 
as the final and formal standard of Lutheran doctrine.] 
2 Cf. Instrum. Pads Westphal. v. 14, 25, 31, 48. 



J 6 Reunion of the Churches. 

the Augsburg Confession, but a theological code which 
the princes enforced by all the means of compul- 
sion at their command. Thenceforward all attempts 
at peace and re-union necessarily ceased. Still more 
fatal was the change which took place in the Catholic 
Church, coinciding with the latter period of the Council 
of Trent and the rise of the Jesuit Order. Hitherto, 
since 1540, and partly before, there had been a con- 
siderable body of learned men in the Church, who 
were attached indeed to the Catholic doctrine and 
communion, but at the same time recommended radical 
reforms and a return to the earlier and purer system 
of the Church, and were accordingly in favour of 
making great concessions to the Protestant party. Such 
had been, in Germany, Erasmus and his friends, and 
then Witzel, Staphylus, Cassander, Wild (or Ferus), and, 
in France, d'Espense, Gentien, Hervet, the Chancellor 
l'Hopital, and others. The gentle Emperor Ferdinand I. 
was substantially of the same mind, differing therein 
from his brother Charles v., who took the Spanish view, 
and only saw in all the movements of the age a 
heresy to be rooted out with fire and sword. Ferdi- 
nand and his son Maximilian n. still hoped for a 
reconciliation. Ferdinand procured the drawing up of 



The German Reformation. 77 

the eirenical memorials of Cassander and Witzel, and 
for a long time demanded more searching reforms from 
the Council of Trent. He did not obtain them, and 
at last agreed, though reluctantly, to the Council being 
closed without having satisfied even the most moderate 
requirements of Church reform. 

The writings of Witzel and Cassander on one side, 
and the opinions and influence of the contemporary 
Jesuits, Laynez, Salmeron, and Canisius, on the other, 
reveal the wide chasm which was on the point of 
opening within the Catholic Church. The former 
started from the principle that, to use Cassander's 
words addressed to the Emperor Ferdinand, the view 
and judgment of the ancient Church must be investi- 
gated, in order that, as far as possible, the present 
Church, which was descended from it, might be restored 
to the form it assumed in its free development after 
Constantine, at the period of the first Councils. 
Cassander adds that the authority of this ancient 
Church is so fully recognised, that both sides, even 
those who are wont to appeal to Scripture only, appeal 
to its verdict. The Jesuits devoted themselves to 
enforcing the opposite view. According to their repre- 
sentation the Church is a great all-embracing Empire, 



78 Reunion of the Churches. 

an absolute monarchy, ruled with irresponsible and 
plenary power by one man, the Pope. To him all alike, 
layman and cleric, king and beggar, are equally and 
absolutely subject. No one has any rights before him, 
and all authority in the Church is an emanation from 
his — a mere deputed power that may at any moment 
be recalled. This papal kingdom must be upheld and 
extended by all means of compulsion and violence, and 
punishments of life and limb, sometimes directly in- 
flicted, sometimes by invoking the secular arm, which is 
bound at once to execute its sentence. To make any 
sort of concession to the rebellious and disobedient 
would be simply to put a premium on rebellion. More- 
over, the Papacy requires large revenues and constant 
influx of money from the whole world, partly on account 
of the enormous expenses involved in the administra- 
tion of a kingdom of 200 millions descending into the 
minutest details, partly that it may be able to reward 
liberally its numerous ministers and instruments. And 
therefore all reforms calculated in any way to diminish 
the papal income are for that reason, if for no other, 
inadmissible. 

There could not, of course, but be bitter enmity 
between the reforming school of Catholic theologians 



The German Reformation. 79 

and the Jesuits, and Witzel said with good reason, " We 
are the object of their fiercest enmity, because they 
wish to preserve the present deformed condition of the 
Church, and, according to the principles of their Order, 
will allow no improvement." 1 The leading men of this 
party soon died off, and those who inherited their ideas 
had to keep silence and conceal themselves, for the 
Jesuits in a rapid course of victory gained possession of 
the Catholic high schools and gymnasia, and became 
confessors and directors of conscience at the Courts, 
and who then would have dared in Catholic Germany 
to disown their rule or breathe a single notion dis- 
pleasing to them ? Moreover, every work which sug- 
gested any concessions at all being made to the ad- 
herents of the Eeformation was promptly condemned at 
Eome, and every such opinion compromised the author's 
safety. And thus on both such sides any approxi- 
mation seemed impossible. In all the domains of 
Catholic princes Protestant worship was suppressed, 
under Jesuit dictation ; it was the professed aim of the 
Order to undermine the treaty of Augsburg. Every- 
thing was rapidly tending to the Thirty Years' War. 



1 See his letters to Cassander in 1565, shortly before his death, in Illus- 
rium et Clarorum Virorum Epistolce, Batav. 1617, p. 280. 



80 Reunion of the Churches. 

Here I must refer to a peculiar difficulty which 
stands in the way of any approximation or friendly 
understanding between the German Protestant Church 
and one of the ancient Churches. I mean the inter- 
ruption of ecclesiastical succession, the abolition of the 
episcopate and episcopal ordination of Presbyters. 
There was no external necessity for Luther and his 
colleagues to do this, for some of the Catholic bishops 
had early come over to their side. But they thought 
that, as in the New Testament the words bishop and 
presbyter are used interchangeably, and the two offices 
were not at first distinguished, the episcopate must be 
regarded as a mere later and human institution. But 
with it much more too was lost, more than at first sight 
they themselves comprehended; the link which attached 
them to the old apostolic Church was severed, and the 
bridge broken down by means of which communion or 
mutual exercise of influence between the two bodies 
might have been maintained or reopened. This ap- 
peared also in their relation to the English Church, 
which had equally issued from the Eeformation, but 
had retained the episcopate, and with it the succession 
and ordination. Consequently, any German Protestant 
minister who wished to enter its service had first to 



The German Reformation. 81 

undergo episcopal ordination, whereas a Latin or Greek 
priest coming over to its communion is received at once 
by virtue of his former orders, the validity of which is 
acknowledged. And on episcopal ordination depends 
the consecration of the Holy Eucharist and absolution. 
And all this was sacrificed on the strength of a doubtful 
interpretation of Scripture, for not a few Protestant 
theologians held that the episcopate was instituted by 
the Apostles, though in the later apostolic age ; and 
all must allow that the whole history of the Church 
from the death of the Apostles exhibits a settled 
episcopate existing everywhere, and indeed is com- 
pletely shaped by it. 

Two distinguished philosophers, Leibnitz and the 
Court preacher Jablonski, about 1701, when Prussia 
became a kingdom, perceived the gravity of the false 
position into which the German Eeformed Church had 
brought herself, and busied themselves with considering 
how the defect might be remedied. Leibnitz thought 
it would have been better if the Eeformers had not 
broken the " linea ordinationis " (the succession) legiti- 
mately preserved in ancient Christendom, and the 
bishops had retained their former position, and priests 



82 Reunion of the Churches. 

been ordained by bishops, as before. 1 Jablonski took 
a similar view. He thought the episcopate had been 
abolished in order to outrage the Kornan Church as 
much as possible, whereby also all the Eastern Churches, 
the English, and all Christian antiquity, was set at 
nought. And he added that its restoration was the 
more to be wished, because it almost seemed as though 
in separating from the Eoman Church they had separ- 
ated from the universal Church also ; but he did not 
deny that there were great difficulties in the way of 
such a restoration, which could only be overcome " by 
a large measure of heroic spirit." 2 

Both representations were addressed to the King of 
Prussia, and Frederick I. actually, on assuming the royal 
title, had two preachers, Ursinus and Sander, conse- 
crated bishops by the English Church, but with their 
death this episcopate again became extinct. In our 
own days Frederick- William iv. again took up the 
subject, and this was one of his reasons for urging 
the establishment of a Protestant bishopric at Jeru- 
salem. Here a bishop of the English Church was to 
impart ordination to German clergymen ; and in the 

1 See Joh. Esth. Kapfen's Einige Vertrauten Briefe, Leipzig, 1745, 
p. 250. 2 Cf. Henke's Magazin, 1795. No. 222. 



The German Reformation. St, 

Kind's instructions occur the words, which have evi- 
dently been carefully chosen, that " he offers his hand 
with full confidence to the episcopal Church of Eng- 
land, which unites with evangelical principles an his- 
torical constitution and ecclesiastical independence 
aiming at universality." This is a gentle but perfectly 
intelligible expression of the feeling that his own 
Church was too much isolated and alienated from 
the great ancient communions ; and it is in fact well 
known that he was dissatisfied with his " sovereign 
episcopate," and would gladly have intrusted the guid- 
ance of the Church to fitter hands, meaning thereby an 
episcopal constitution. 



LECTUEE V. 

EEACTION TOWARDS UNION ON THE CONTINENT IN THE 
SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 

rr^HE Germans displayed a quite remarkable patience 
-^ in attempting for nearly a century to heal the 
religious schism by means of public conferences, the 
latest of which took place in 1601 at Eatisbon, and 
1618 at Prague. But this only resulted in scholastic 
disputations, in which everything turned on dialectical 
skill and promptness, and the one point aimed at was 
to perplex the adversary and involve him in a contra- 
diction. The upshot, as a rule, was simply to widen 
the chasm, and increase mutual bitterness, without any 
real gain to either side. And that always will be the 
result when each party starts with the conviction of its 
own absolute perfection, and seeks nothing but victory 
and the conversion of opponents to its own views. 
In the period succeeding the Thirty Years' War, many 

84 



Reaction of Seventeenth Century. 85 

members of trie Lutheran Church felt uncomfortable 
and dissatisfied with their position. There was some- 
thing oppressive and humiliating in the yoke of civil 
domination over the Church, and its entire dependence 
on secular princes and their theological advisers. It 
is true that the scandalous and violent changes of 
the religion of whole countries, such as took place in 
the Palatinate, in Anhalt, and elsewhere, ceased after 
the Westphalian Peace, and the religious changes of 
sovereigns affected themselves only. But still the 
whole Church system remained in the hands of Con- 
sistories, under royal control. And to this must be 
added the theological ossification and narrow rigidity 
of the doctrines which had to be maintained according 
to the Formulary of Concord. From these causes 
sprang a double reaction, among the laity and the 
theologians. The lay reaction manifested itself partly 
in the growing frequency of conversions to Catholicism ; 
many felt the authority of Popes and Councils to be 
preferable to that of a secular prince. On the other 
hand, the whole religious literature of the laity, from 
the seventeenth to far into the eighteenth century, is 
penetrated with a profound dissatisfaction at the con- 
dition of the system and prevalent teaching of the 



&6 Reunion of the Churches. 

Protestant Church. The theological reaction was 
chiefly developed in the writings and school of George 
Calixtus, as represented at the two universities of 
Helmstadt and Konigsberg. Calixtus insisted on the 
authority of ecclesiastical tradition, rightly understood, 
viz., the consentient teaching of the first five centuries, 
being recognised as well as the scriptural evidence of 
doctrine. And thus he approximated to the ancient 
Churches, both Eastern and Latin, and evoked the most 
vigorous opposition. His view, which is now shared by 
so many of the very best men, that the three particular 
Churches should not regard themselves as faultless and 
incapable of improvement, found no acceptance then on 
either side. 

Meanwhile, towards the end of the seventeenth 
century the number of converts to the Catholic Church 
increased. Queen Christina, the talented and accom- 
plished daughter of Gustavus Adolphus, resigned the 
Swedish throne to embrace Catholicism, in order to 
take refuge in the ship of ecclesiastical authority from 
the ocean of philosophical doubt. Still more remarkable 
was the conversion of the learned Landgrave of Hesse- 
Ehineland, who, after twenty years' experience, wrote a 
book full of well-meant but unsparing exposure of the 



Reaction of Seventeenth Century. Sy 

abuses he had discovered in the Church of his choice. 
The motives of several other conversions of princes and 
princesses about the same period were less disinterested. 
Further influences co-operated to produce in thinking 
Protestants a longing, if not for the Catholic Church, 
for the appropriation of its prerogatives. The Nether- 
lander, Hugo Grotius, who was celebrated throughout 
Europe as an acute and many-sided scholar, had in his 
widely circulated writings insisted far more strongly 
than Calixtus on the profound and excessive divergence 
of Protestantism from the Church of the early centuries, 
and the necessity of either seeking a reunion with the 
ancient Church, or at least restoring much which had 
been rejected. And afterwards a great impression was 
produced by the accession of a truly pious and model 
Pope in the person of Innocent XI. (1676-1689), who 
was at once engaged in earnest conflict with the Jesuits, 
and made an attempt, feeble and ineffectual as it proved, 
to put a check on their pernicious system of morals. 
He was the only Pope who made such advances to 
the Protestants as entirely to approve the negotiations 
of Spinola, which were based on extensive concessions. 
But his participation had to be kept secret, and Spinola 
was obliged to act in his own name, without appealing 



88 Reunion of the Churches. 

to the plenary powers granted him by the Pope, be- 
cause the French Cardinals in Rome were opposed to 
the scheme. 1 A religious reconciliation with Germany 
would then, as afterwards, have been very inconvenient 
for French policy. 

These labours for reunion commenced in Germany 
in 1675, and lasted about thirty years. Eoyas de 
Spinola, a Spaniard who had come to Germany as 
confessor of the Emperor Leopold's wife, and was made 
bishop first of Teria (in Croatia), and then of Neustadt 
near Vienna, was the first to undertake the enterprise. 
Germany was still suffering from the effects of the 
Thirty Years' War, and the Jesuits, who were its authors, 
were as powerful as ever at the Courts of Paris and 
Vienna. Both the Emperor Leopold and Louis xiv. 
had intrusted their consciences to them, and followed 
their counsel implicitly in religious matters ; and if 
the houses of Hapsburg and Bourbon were united, and 
abandoned their feud of 150 years' standing, they 
seemed strong enough to crush Protestantism on the 
Continent, the more so as it had no powerful protector 

1 [Some account of Spinola's labours, and of the negotiations for union 
in the seventeenth century generally, may be found in two articles on 
"Leibnitz's Letters on Reunion," in the Contemporary Review for May 
and August 1867.1 



Reaction of Seventeenth Century. 89 

to fall back upon. But there was no prospect of this, 
owing to the hostile attitude assumed by Louis towards 
the imperial house and the German Empire. The 
Emperor Leopold was so deeply interested in the suc- 
cess of the undertaking that he at last brought the 
negotiations for union to Vienna, and summoned 
Leibnitz thither. 

On the German Protestant side stood Leibnitz and 
Molanus, the latter a well-grounded theologian of the 
school of Calixtus; the former the leading mind of 
Germany at that date, equally acute and capacious, and 
of immense knowledge — an universal genius in his day, 
like Aristotle of old, and in fact the first who raised 
the credit of Germany before the world after the deep 
decay of the seventeenth century. After a while, 
Bossuet, the most influential of the French bishops, 
who might almost be called the theological oracle of 
his age, was brought into the negotiations through the 
intervention of some royal ladies. 1 Bossuet's famous 
Exposition of the Catholic Faith had appeared some 
time before, and had at once been translated into all 
languages. The aim of his book was to distinguish 

1 [Especially of Anna Gonzaga of Mantua, wife of Edward, Count Pala- 
tine.] 



90 Reunion of the Churches, 

what is really dogma from theological opinions and 
inferences, and to place it before Protestants in the least 
repellent form. It had been approved and commended 
in Eome by Pope and Cardinals, and has almost 
attained and preserved down to our own day the 
anthority of a Confession of Faith. Now, of course, like 
so many other writings and views, it is abolished and 
become obsolete, for it says nothing of the new articles 
of faith fabricated since 1854, and characterizes as 
mere school opinions what are now proposed as Divine 
revelations. Thus Bossuet puts aside the question of 
Infallibility, as a mere scholastic controversy having 
no relation to faith ; and this was approved at Eome 
at the time. Now, of course, he is no longer re- 
garded in his own country as the classical theologian 
and most eminent doctor of modern times, but as a 
man who devoted his most learned and comprehen- 
sive work, the labour of many years, to the establish- 
ment and defence of a fundamental error, and spent 
many years of his life in the perversion of facts and 
distortion of authorities. For that must be the present 
verdict of every infallibilist on Bossuet. 

At that time the first condition in all such negotia- 
tions, which had to be demanded on the Catholic side, 



Reaction of Seventeenth Century. 9 i 

was that the Protestants should no longer regard and 
designate the Pope as Antichrist, and when this was 
agreed upon Spinola and Molanus thought a great 
point was gained. For this view was still universally 
prevalent, and dominated the thoughts and feelings of 
the people to such a degree that a contemporary 
theologian, Hermann of Hurdt, could write to his 
colleague Fabricius of Helmstadt that " all Protestants 
are so bewitched with this conceit about Antichrist, 
that they fly from Catholics as from snakes in the 
garden, and think they see a dragon or an evil spirit if 
they meet a Catholic." 1 According to the received view, 
the apocalyptic images of the harlot seated on the 
beast, who is drunk with the blood of the saints and 
disciples of Jesus, and of Babylon that deceived the 
nations, were not to be understood of heathen but of 
papal Piome, and the Pope himself as the Antichrist 
of Scripture, — a view put forward by the Protestant 
divines as the foundation of their religion, though it 
is inconsistent with Scripture and involves fatal con- 
tradictions. But Eome was partly responsible for its 
growth. If the Pope was constantly urging on religious 
wars, and recommending the extermination of all 

1 Mensel's Magazin, 1788, p. 118. 



92 Reunion of the Churches, 

heretics by the sword — and even at Eome executions 
for Protestantism continued down into the seventeenth 
century, — the people were sure to think they saw the 
Papacy in the apocalyptic woman drunk with the blood 
of the saints, just as it was easy to identify the Man of 
Sin spoken of by St. Paul, who exalts himself above 
everything divine, and sits in the temple of God, with 
the Pope, claiming to be vicar of God, and to exercise 
absolute dominion over all nations and Churches. 
Untenable as these interpretations are critically, they 
have had an enormous influence. At the time of the 
Eeformation many thought this the only ground which 
would justify them in conscience in separating from 
the old Church and establishing a new one. For it is 
said of Babylon or Eome in the Apocalypse, "Come 
out of her, My people, that ye be not partakers in her 
sins." Even during the last century these views have 
had an enormous influence, and have built up a brazen 
wall between Catholics and Protestants. At this hour 
they are still deeply rooted and powerful in England and 
America, and supported by a copious and constantly 
increasing apocalyptic literature. But in Germany 
they have long since disappeared from the popular 
belief, notwithstanding the sanction of the Smalkaldic 



Reaction of Seventeenth Century. 93 

Articles, and thereby, as it seems to me, one of the 
most serious hindrances to a reunion of the two reli- 
gions is removed. 1 

But at the end of the seventeenth century it was 
very different in Germany. Then the song was sung 
year by year in every Evangelical congregation — 

" Defend us by thy word, Lord, 

From Pope and Paynim's murderous sword," 2 

and the events of almost every year supplied a practical 
commentary on this juxtaposition of the two great 
enemies. In Hungary there had been a bloody perse- 
cution of Protestants, lasting ten years, and it was 
notorious to all the world how Louis xiv. treated the 
Eeformed in France. The preachers therefore were 
never at a loss for opportunities of asking the prayers 
of their congregations for co-religionists suffering under 
Antichristian tyranny. And the feeling thus engendered 
made it impossible to bring theological negotiations 
for reunion before the public ; on the contrary, such 
attempts had to be kept strictly private. 

1 [See first Appendix in the author's First Age of Christianity and the 
Church (W. H. Allen and Co.), on " History of Interpretation of 2 Thess. 
ii. 12."] 

2 [Cf. the popular Scotch ditty quoted in Scott's Abbot — 

" The Paip, that Pagan fu' o' pride, 
Hath blinded us ower lang."] 



94 Rerinion of the Churches. 

Leibnitz did not become a Catholic privately, as has 
been inferred from his unpublished work discovered 
in MS. some fifty years ago, the so-called Sy sterna 
Theologicum. This work was only meant to show what 
a thinking man might urge from the Catholic stand- 
point in favour of the controverted Catholic dogmas. 
He did not indeed adhere to the Protestant form of 
belief, in which there was much that he disapproved. 
He wrote to the Landgrave of Hesse that had he been 
born in the Catholic Church he should never have left 
it, but that he could not join it while certain doctrines 
continued to be enforced in all their naked harshness. 
He thought the Protestants ought to accept any doctrine 
proved to have been universally received in the ancient 
Church of the Eoman Empire. And in fact Molanus 
had already managed to get rid of so many difficulties 
that Bossuet thought the union would be pretty well 
accomplished if the other theologians assented to his 
view. But both Leibnitz and Molanus considered it 
essential that the Tridentine Council, with its manifold 
anathemas, should be suspended, and the controverted 
points examined and compared at a new Council, 
composed of Catholics and Protestants in common. 
Leibnitz appealed in support of this view to the con- 



Reaction of Seventeenth Century. 95 

cessions made at Basle to the Hussites. A still better 
example would have been the Council of Florence, 
where all the points of difference with the Greeks were 
allowed to be re-examined and compared by both sides 
together, without regard to the decrees of the Council of 
Lyons in 1274. 1 This condition however proved fatal 
to the whole scheme. 

The greatest difficulties, the stumblingblocks which 
could not be removed, did not even come under 
discussion, or were only incidentally referred to. That 
same Molanus, who showed himself so conciliatory and 
almost Catholic in matters of doctrine, afterwards 
maintained against his colleagues that the revocation of 
the edict of Nantes, and the persecution of Protestants 
in France, with the formal approval of these proceed- 
ings by the very best of the Popes, Innocent XI., had 
done more to confirm him in drawing a line between 
Protestant and Papal doctrine than all the contro- 
versial divinity he had ever seen. 2 Yet even Bossuet 

1 [The Council of Florence was accordingly to have been accepted on 
both sides, had the reunion proved permanent, as the Eighth (Ecumenical 
Council, passing over all the mediaeval Councils since the separation of 
East and West. It is actually called Octavum Concilium in the first Latin 
issue of the Acts, published in 1526 under Clement vii., and thirty years 
later in Cardinal Pole's Reformatio Anglioe, a collection of statutes made 
by him in his legatine capacity, and published at Rome in 1566.] 

2 See the letter in Leukfeld's Antiquitates Amelunstbornenses, p. 113. 



96 Reunion of the Churches. 

was unable to see, what must have been so clear to 
every thinking man, that a Church which makes a rule 
and principle of coercing conscience and exterminating 
heretics by the sword, can only inspire hatred and 
detestation. There was one Pope, however, Clement 
xiv., who does appear to have seen it. He says, " What 
a happy revolution would have been witnessed, if, 
instead of being persecuted, heretics had simply been 
entreated and adjured with all possible gentleness not 
to separate from the centre of unity ; if their difficulties 
had been explained with kindness, their objections 
patiently listened to, and if, above all, they had been 
addressed, as religion itself speaks, without bitterness 
or pride." l I don't know whether Ganganelli remem- 
bered, when he wrote this, that he was condemning a 
long line of his predecessors, and above all the canonized 
Pius v. 

There were other hostile and menacing circumstances 
in the background of these negotiations for union, which 
cast a dark shadow over every gleam of hope. Chief 
among these was the Eoman notion of the absolute 
power of the Pope, and all attempts in apologetic 
writings and expositions, such as Bossuet's and Veron's 

1 Letter e Interessanti di Clemente XIV., Ninezia, 1778, iv. 60. 



Reaction of Seventeenth Century. 97 

before him, to explain this away, or make it look 
harmless and beneficial, were sure in the end to prove 
illusory. ~No Protestant ever judged the Papacy more 
favourably than Leibnitz, who wished to see the 
temporal power of the Popes still further increased and 
extended over the whole of Italy, that they might be 
the better able to act as European arbiters, and hinder 
wars of conquest. But an unlimited despotic power, 
such as the Jesuits and all the Eomanist party ascribed 
to the Court of Eome, he considered equally intolerable 
and mischievous. Then again it was a standing reproach 
and objection urged against every representation of 
Catholic doctrine put out for the benefit of Protestants, 
that what looked good and innocent on paper had in 
fact, and in its practical application to popular life, a 
very different and most objectionable character. This 
feeling was vividly expressed in the universal contra- 
diction to Bossuet's representation evoked in Protestant 
Europe. Even Molanus did not conceal his conviction 
that the Papal Church was far worse in worship than 
in doctrine, as he had witnessed it in Italy, Spain, and 
other Catholic countries ; it was, indeed, so corrupted 
that a thinking man, unacquainted with the Eeformed 
doctrine, could not but suppose the Christian religion 

G 



98 Reunion of the Churches. 

was a political invention of the Popes for keeping men 
in subjection. 1 The utter helplessness of the disputants 
in this matter was brought to light when they came to 
consider, in view of a future union, how the worst 
excrescences of a crude and immoral superstition, by 
the help of which the religious Orders preyed upon the 
people, could be restrained. But with the independent 
position of these Orders, and their financial wants, 
nobody had any effective remedy to suggest. Leibnitz 
says in one place, — " The great question is still this — 
how far it is allowable to wink at the public corrup- 
tions, especially when it looks as if the steps taken 
amounted to a tacit approval of them." 2 

Bossuet's biographer, Cardinal Bausset, cannot ex- 
plain by what fatality these promising efforts after 
union, after proceeding so far, and with so rich a com- 
bination of talent, learning, and good-will engaged in 
the cause, came to nothing, and left no trace behind 
them. He thinks the interposition of Leibnitz frightened 
the theologians, and ruined everything. Far from it ; 
on the contrary, Leibnitz would have made concessions 
which the theologians shrank from. The real reason 

1 Hock, Anton Ulrich, p. 113. 

2 See Rheinfeld Brief wechsel, ed. Bomniel, ii. 78. 



Reaction of Seventeenth Century. 99 

was a different one. In dealing with a Church where 
the actual creed of daily life differs so widely from the 
theoretical creed, it is impossible to get beyond mere 
theoretical negotiations. Bossuet himself did not choose 
to see that; whenever any gross abuse was brought 
before him, he would always point triumphantly to the 
substance of the doctrine, which contained nothing 
of the kind. And yet the great bishop and famous 
doctor might himself have been pointed out as a 
conspicuous example of ecclesiastical impotence. He 
found himself, in his own Church, in presence of a 
doctrine invented only a century before, which could 
not but have a most decisive influence on the religious 
position of every Christian, — the doctrine that fear 
alone, without love of God, is sufficient for the 
remission of sins. He considered this a most dangerous 
error, affecting the very essence of Christianity, and 
wrote against it ; but he could not prevent the most 
powerful of the religious Orders, with the knowledge 
and support of the Holy See, taking this error under 
its patronage, and acting upon it in the confessional 
in his own diocese. Yet he found it quite in order 
that every one who had desired to administer Com- 
munion according to Christ's institution, simply for the 



ioo Reunion of the Churches. 

sake of union and obedience, should have been excom- 
municated. For theologians understand well how to 
strain out gnats and swallow camels. 

After these fruitless attempts of Bossuet, Molanus, 
and Leibnitz, nothing further of the kind was under- 
taken for 170 years, either in Germany or elsewhere. 1 
Men were thoroughly discouraged and deterred. On the 
Protestant side, the gradual advance of rationalism 
hindered any further thought of union, and among 
Catholics there could be no idea of reviving those efforts 
till after the abolition of the Jesuits in 1773. But 
they had too much to do in setting their own house in 
order, and the best of them thought they could only 
invite the guests they wished to see when the house had 
been cleansed. In our own day there are phenomena 
which exhibit a real or apparent affinity with the ideas 
and efforts it is the aim of these Lectures to suggest to 
the minds of believing Christians. Many would reckon 
among these the " Evangelical Alliance," a British and 
American product of a kind of unionist sentiment. 
But this association, of which very little has been 
heard lately, has confined itself to a mere external 

1 [The correspondence of Archbishop Wake with the doctors of the 
Sorbonne early in the eighteenth century had a similar aim, though it led 
to no result.] 



Reaction of Seventeenth Century. 101 

combination and common action of all Protestant 
communities for an offensive and defensive alliance 
against the ancient Churches. The fusion of the 
Lutheran and Eeformed Churches brought about by 
Frederick- William HI. has remained a mere fragmentary 
work, and has led to internal divisions, the end of 
which is yet to be seen ; and one of the most eminent 
Protestant theologians, Kahnis, has declared only this 
year that " the introduction of the union into the 
Lutheran national Churches of Germany, Eussia, and 
Scandinavia, would be the beginning of incurable 
discords which would probably end in their dissolution. 
To carry it out generally is an impossibility." 1 The 
fundamental principle of this union, which is to leave 
the most opposite doctrines to co-exist side by side, 
unmodified and unreconciled, and let every one choose 
between them, has not succeeded. 

The recently formed community of the Irvingites 
might be regarded as in some sense a favourable symp- 
tom, pointing to hopes of union. It includes some 
highly respectable men, familiar with ecclesiastical anti- 
quity. The exclusive product of a Protestant soil, and 
founded by men trained in Protestant belief, it approxi- 

1 Christenthum und Lutherthum, Leipsic, 1872. 



102 Reitnion of the Churches. 

mates in essential points to the ancient Churches of 
East and West. It reminds one strongly of a pheno- 
menon of the second century, Montanism. Perhaps 
it is still possible to strip off from the system much 
which appears to those who look at it from without 
too fantastical and directly contradictory to the mind 
of the ancient Church, such as the revival of the 
Apostolate, and the immediate expectation of the great 
crisis of the world's history intimated in Scripture. 

Where faith and love are found, there hope cannot 
be absent. He who believes in Christ, and loves his 
country and Christians of all confessions, cannot divest 
himself of the hope that no distant future may reveal a 
Church which, as the genuine heir and representative 
of the Church of the early centuries, may have room 
and power of attraction for those who are now sepa- 
rated ; a Church where liberty will be reconciled with 
order, discipline, morality, and unity of faith with 
science and freedom of inquiry. 



LECTUKE VI. 

THE ENGLISH REFORMATION, ITS NATURE AND RESULTS. 



A 



l the beginning of the Eeformation the island 
kingdom of England was far behind-hand in 
power, wealth, and population ; indeed, 150 years later 
it had only five million inhabitants. It possessed no 
fleets, no manufactures, no colonies, and no army. 
But it was better prepared ecclesiastically than the 
Latin countries for receiving the seed brought over 
from Germany. From the end of the thirteenth cen- 
tury, and constantly during the fourteenth, it had 
resisted the encroachments and extortionate demands 
of the Eoman Court with the united force of King 
and Parliament. And Wycliffe, one of Luther's 
forerunners, and the Lollard sect, had disseminated 
doctrines which partly corresponded with those pro- 
claimed at Wittenberg. But it was from above, and 
not from beneath, as in Germany, from the Crown, 

103 



104 Reunion of the Churches. 

not from the people, that the ecclesiastical revolution 
in England received its impulse, rule, and form. No 
man of first-rate eminence appeared — no Luther, or 
Calvin, or Melanchthon — to take the lead of the move- 
ment. Minds of an inferior order, possessed with the 
ideas struck out at Wittenberg and Zurich, served as 
the instruments for naturalizing those principles in 
England and effecting the ecclesiastical changes. 

It is well known that what brought about the breach 
with Eome and the transference of the papal supremacy 
to the King was the affair of Henry viil's divorce. 
The whole English clergy submitted, renounced the 
Pope, and promised to regard him henceforth only as 
Bishop of Rome. One bishop alone, Fisher of Eochester, 
resisted, and went to the scaffold. There was no inten- 
tion, however, of separating from communion with the 
Pope ; and his rights in relation to the universal Church, 
such as the summoning and presiding over General 
Councils, were not called in question. The people 
were expressly assured that England continued to be 
a portion of the Catholic Church, of which the Roman 
Church was another branch. 1 ISTor was there any 
change of doctrine introduced. But a series of Acts 

1 In the Institution of a Christian Man, 1537, approved hy twenty-one 
Bishops. See Formularies of Faith (Oxford, 1825), p. 55. 



The English Reformation. 105 

were passed — the Parliament being entirely at one with 
the King — which extended the royal authority over the 
Church further, until at last all ecclesiastical power 
seemed to be derived from the Crown. The notion 
invented by the sycophants of Home since the 
thirteenth century, that the episcopal was a mere 
derivation from the papal authority, was now in Eng- 
land transferred to the Crown. 

Clement vn. had already excommunicated the King, 
but in 1538 appeared a Bull of his successor, Paul in., 
which excited universal astonishment, for it almost 
looked as if he wished to alienate the whole nation 
from him, and drive it into complete separation from 
the See of Borne. He not only deposed the King and 
consigned him to eternal perdition, if he did not 
appear before his tribunal, but laid all England 
under an interdict, which means, according to Boman 
teaching, that a Pope punishes and imperils the 
salvation of millions of innocent persons for the sins 
of one or a few guilty persons. He forbade all divine 
worship and administration of sacraments, 1 forbade every 
Englishman to obey any royal command, deprived all 

1 [There are some exceptions to this rule. Baptism can be administered 
to children, and the last sacraments to the dying, under an interdict, and 
confessions can be heard. — Cf. Soglia, Instit. Jur. Priv. Eccl., Paris, p. 556.] 



106 Reunion of the Churches. 

the King's adherents of their civil rights, abrogated all 
treaties made with them or oaths sworn to them, pro- 
hibited all traffic with them, and gave up the property 
of all Englishmen to be plundered by foreigners. And 
this was done in 1538, when a great part of Germany 
and Switzerland, and the northern kingdoms, had 
already risen against Eome, and thousands in Europe 
were eager to make capital out of such weak points of 
the Eoman See, and thus increase the widely-spread 
abhorrence of the Curia. It might really be regarded 
as an example of judicial blindness. 

After Henry's death in 1547 the Eeformation was 
carried further in a Protestant sense under Edward vi., 
always from above, by means of the royal supremacy 
over the Church. Archbishop Cranmer, and Somerset, 
who was regent for his nephew, a boy of ten years old, 
worked together, not without opposition from the mass 
of the people, who were still Catholic in their 
sympathies ; and there were revolts, which had to be 
extinguished in blood. For the nobility seized the 
Church property, the country people took up arms, the 
class of small landowners disappeared, and tenant- 
farmers took their place. But among the clergy there 
was only passive submission. 



The English Re forma Hon . 107 

The whole edifice of the new religion collapsed when 
Mary, the daughter of a Spanish mother and wife of 
Philip 11. of Spain, succeeded to the throne on the early 
death of Edward. Unreservedly devoted to the Pope, 
full of burning hatred against the new heresy, and hard 
and pitiless as her father, she at once broke the promise 
given to the people, when they rose in her favour, of 
leaving the laws of the land unaltered. She surrounded 
herself with like-minded counsellors, and a Parliament 
elected under strong government influence seconded all 
her plans. Cardinal Pole appeared, as papal legate, to 
absolve the nation from the anathemas of Eome, and 
England found itself again under the dominion of the 
Pope. The nation was soon taught at how dear a price 
of human life it had again become Eoman. Hitherto 
the Protestant doctrine had made little advance in the 
minds of the people, the majority of whom adhered to 
their ancestral faith ; the decided Protestants could be 
named and counted. But now the papal legate, 
Cardinal Pole, the man who ruled England both in 
religious and civil matters, was himself charged with 
suspicion of heresy by the terrible Paul IV.— the Pope 
who saw no salvation for Italy or the world except in 
the dungeons and piles of the Inquisition, — and was 



io8 Reunion of the Churches. 

summoned to Eome to answer for his faith. He did 
not go, but left his implacable persecution and exter- 
mination of heretics to bear witness before the Pope 
and the Eoman Inquisition to his unimpeachable 
orthodoxy. And thus within three years about 300 
persons were burnt, including some bishops, several 
priests, and fifty-five women. 

Hundreds of thousands of Protestant writings scat- 
tered over the length and breadth of the land, and 
disseminated in the cottages of the poor, would not 
have done so much to strengthen the Protestant 
doctrine as the spectacle of the fires of Smithfield, and 
the testimony borne by so many men and women, most 
of whom could have purchased their lives by recanta- 
tion, going with such wonderful courage to the stake. 
The impression then made has remained to this day 
powerfully and indelibly impressed on the popular 
mind. And if the hatred of everything called Popery 
has shown itself for the last three centuries stronger 
and deeper in England than in any other nation, Mary 
and her counsellors are responsible for the origin of a 
feeling which was no doubt afterwards intensified by 
the Gunpowder Plot. 

Mary carried with her to the grave the hatred and 



The English Reformation. 109 

detestation of her people; and her sister Elizabeth 
mounted the throne in 1558 amid loud and universal 
rejoicings. The re-establishment of papal domination 
had not obtained much favour even among the populace, 
whose sympathies were Catholic, and Paul IV. himself 
took care that the new Queen should have no choice. 
He made it a question of life and death for her to 
abjure Eome. When she announced her accession to 
him, he replied by censuring her " presumption," and 
declaring that she had been stigmatized by his prede- 
cessors as illegitimate, and therefore incapable of 
succeeding, and that the decision on the subject 
belonged to him alone as suzerain of England, a 
pretension of Eome long since rejected by Parliament. 

The supremacy over the Church which her father 
and brother had enjoyed was now again assigned by 
Parliament to the Queen, who thereby took the place 
of the Pope. The Act of Uniformity imposed on all 
Churches the use of the Liturgy of Edward VI., modified 
in a Catholic sense. 1 Every clergyman was required, 
on pain of deprivation, to take the Oath of Royal 

1 [That is, the Second Liturgy of Edward vi. It had been the Queen's 
original wish and intention to restore the First, and with some Catholic 
additions ; but it was found necessary to abandon the design, in order to 
conciliate the extreme, or, as it was afterwards called, Puritan party. — 
See Hook's Life of Archbishop Parker, pp. 158 sqq.] 



1 10 Reunion of the Churches. 

Supremacy, and out of 9000 only about 189, or one in 
fifty, refused it. 1 Most of the bishops refused, and new 
ones were appointed and validly ordained, so that the 
succession was not interrupted. A short formulary of 
faith, in Thirty- nine Articles, setting forth substan- 
tially the Protestant doctrine, but in modified form and 
with many compromises, became law. And thus the 
Eeformation in England and the edifice of the English 
episcopal Church was completed. It differed from all 
reformed Churches of the Continent, but wished to 
remain in connexion with them ; and the political 
situation forced Elizabeth more and more into the posi- 
tion of a protector of European Protestantism generally. 
Meanwhile the number of Catholics was still con- 
siderable, but as all churches and chapels belonged to 
the dominant religion, and absence from service was 
punished with fines, they took part in public worship ; 
and thus to all outward appearance there seemed to be 
but one Church in the country, and every likelihood of 
the old faith dying out in one or two generations. This 
state of things lasted till about 1570, when new priests, 

i [This must be taken with, some reserve. The Supremacy Oath was 
certainly imposed by law from the first ; but there is reason to believe 
that for many years of Elizabeth's reign the majority of the clergy 
abstained from taking it, with the tacit connivance of the Government. 
There is no evidence of more than about 800 being sworn in 1559.] 



The English Reformation. 1 1 1 

trained in the strictest Eoman system, came to England 
from the clerical seminaries established on the Con- 
tinent, and the Jesuits also commenced their labours 
there. Then, for the first time, many separated them- 
selves from the national worship; and then, too, 
appeared the Bull of Pius v., which not only deposed 
Elizabeth, but forbade all Englishmen to acknowledge 
her on pain of excommunication, without, however, 
proposing any other king or regent for their allegiance. 
And thus all Catholics who did not rebel were excom- 
municated, and it seemed to be the sole aim of the 
Pope, who had already tried to get Elizabeth put out 
of the way by assassination, to produce a general 
confusion and bloody civil war in England. 

The most zealous of the Papal party wanted to make 
Philip of Spain master of England. A series of plots, 
conspiracies, and revolts followed. Elizabeth could say 
with truth that her life was daily threatened, and more 
than any other in Europe. A new Bull of Sixtus v., 
issued in 1588 in support of the Spanish invasion, 
renewed her deposition, on the express ground that the 
Pope alone was entitled to decide who should wear 
the English crown. 1 Well might Urban vm. say after- 

1 [It is remarkable, however, that Sixtus v., one of the ablest Popes of 



1 1 2 Reunion of the Churches. 

wards that the Popes, his predecessors, were respon- 
sible for the loss of England. 1 The laws against foreign 
priests were now made more stringent, and the mere 
performance of sacerdotal functions became a capital 
offence. A considerable number of priests were actually 
executed, who showed great constancy in death. The 
first who were condemned were questioned as to 
whether they would obey the Pope or the laws of the 
land in civil matters, and those who answered in the 
latter sense were spared. 

Meanwhile the Jesuits had developed their doctrine 
of tyrannicide into a system, and had disseminated it 
both by writing and orally. They taught that, as the 
Pope has a divine right, in the interest of religion, to 
depose monarchs and annul all their official acts, the 
deposed monarch, if he tries to retain his dignity, is an 
usurper and tyrant, and may be put to death. That 
this teaching endangered the life of every prince dis- 

the post-Reformation era, personally entertained a strong sympathy for 
Elizabeth, and to the last cherished hopes of her conversion. At one time 
he even requested Henry in. of France to enter into communication with 
her on the subject, and he seems to have given only a reluctant sanction 
to the Spanish Armada. On the other hand, Elizabeth, when urged by 
her ministers to marry, was wont to reply, " I know of but one man 
worthy of my hand, and that is Sixtus v." — Cf. Hubner's Life and Times 
of Sixtus V., passim.] 

1 [A similar remark is attributed to Pius iv. in reference to Paul iv.'s 
policy.] 



The English Reformation. 113 

pleasing to the Court of Eome was shown in the 
murder of Henry ill. of France, and the attempts 
on the life of Henry IV., and of William of Orange, 
for these two princes also at last fell beneath the 
daggers of fanatics. And if there was already a 
disposition in England to look on every Catholic 
as a born enemy of the State and its rulers, this 
was further increased by the Gunpowder Plot at 
the beginning of James i.'s reign, which filled up the 
measure of the misfortunes of the unhappy adherents 
of the old Church. The discovery of this Satanic plot 
for blowing up King and Parliament was commemo- 
rated in England by a Church festival, only recently 
abolished. Pope Clement viil, who had some years 
previously urged Henry iv. to assist the King of Spain 
in conquering England, had just before directed the 
Catholics to hinder the accession of James, and Eng- 
lish Jesuits were deeply implicated in the plot, of 
whom two were found guilty and executed, and one 
escaped. King James, with the view of providing some 
protection for his own life and that of his son, intro- 
duced, in concurrence with Parliament, a special oath 
for Catholics — the Oath of Allegiance. They were to 
abjure, as impious and heretical, the doctrine that the 

H 



1 14 Reunion of the Churches. 

Pope can depose sovereigns and absolve subjects from 
their oath of allegiance, and that princes excommuni- 
cated by the Pope may be deposed and murdered. The 
sorely oppressed Catholics, whose condition had been 
rendered much worse by the last conspiracy, were to 
gain some toleration by taking this oath ; but Paul v. 
forbade their taking it on pain of damnation, and all 
Catholics who took it were to be refused the sacra- 
ments. And Cardinal Bellarmine wrote a treatise to 
prove its unlawfulness. 

Meanwhile no express declaration of the Eoman 
Court, explaining in what the soul-destroying char- 
acter of the oath consisted, could be obtained by any 
entreaties, and many priests suffered death rather than 
take it. James, who, from various political grounds, 
and partly from fear, wished to be on peaceable terms 
with the See of Eome, intimated to the Pope, through 
the French ambassador, that he would acknowledge 
him as the first bishop and president of the Church, 
if he would renounce the arrogant claim to depose 
sovereigns. But Paul replied that he could not do so 
without falling into heresy himself. This conduct of the 
Pope's made the condition of Catholics in England a 
terribly painful one — the priests threatened with death 



The English Reformation. 115 

on the scaffold, and the laity objects of universal sus- 
picion, detested by their fellow-countrymen and sub- 
jected to heavy exactions. There seemed no prospect 
left them but of constant diminution and gradual 
extinction; and in fact they had dwindled down to 
150,000 by 1630, according to the report of the Papal 
nuncio, Panzani. Well might they represent to Pome, 
through Father Leander, that they had suffered more 
for the Papacy than any other Catholics. 1 Father 
Leander also represented that Charles I. was surprised 
to find that doctrines allowed in Prance were con- 
demned in England. It was universally said that the 

1 [Father Leander, an English Benedictine, was sent to England by- 
Urban VIII. in 1632, and Father Panzani, an Oratorian of Arezzo, in 1634, 
both with the sanction of the Government, as well to examine and report 
on the condition of the English Eoman Catholics as on the true state 
of the Church of England. On the latter point they reported very 
favourably, and the idea of a reunion was seriously entertained on both 
sides, though it eventually fell through, chiefly owing to the bitter oppo- 
sition of the Jesuits on one side, and the Puritans on the other. Father 
Leander reports of the Anglicans : " They agree in all the doctrine of the 
Trinity and Incarnation and true Deity of our Blessed Saviour ; in the 
points of Providence, predestination, j ustification, necessity of good works, 
co-operation of free will with the grace of God. They admit the first four 
General Councils, the three authentic symbols of the Apostles, Nice or 
Constantinople, and of St. Athanasius, as they are received in the Eoman 
Church : they reverence the primitive Church and unanimous consent of 
the ancient Fathers, and all traditions and ceremonies which can be suffi- 
ciently proved by testimony of antiquity : they admit a settled liturgy 
taken out of the Eoman liturgy, distinction of orders, bishops, priests, 
and deacons, in distinct habits from the laity, and divers other points in 
which no transmarine Protestants do agree." — Clarendon State Papers, 
vol. i. p. 207 ; quoted also in Charles Butler's Book of the Roman Catholic 



1 1 6 Reunion of the Churches. 

Popes vindicated the doctrines whereby the authors of 
the Gunpowder Plot excused their murderous attack 
on the King and the nobility. 

But now, as before, it was all in vain. The Popes 
had again and again been told that the notion of 
murder committed in the interests of religion being 
meritorious, was so widely spread, so disgraceful and 
injurious to Catholicism, and so strongly confirmed by 
Jesuit writings, that there was urgent need for one 
Pope at least publicly and solemnly to condemn this 
error. But Eome held her peace; it was impossible 
even to get the worst of the Jesuit writings which 
recommended tyrannicide placed on the Index. 

The events which occurred in Ireland served to in- 
tensify the hatred of the English nation against Eome 
and the Catholics, and to exhibit the Popes as the most 
irreconcilable and dangerous enemies of England. On 

Church, p. 2. And he adds : " Union seemeth possible enough, if the 
points were discussed in an assembly of moderate men, without contention 
or desire of victory, but out of a sincere desire of Christian union ; espe- 
cially since the learned er sort of Protestants hold this difference to be no 
impediment to salvation, and grant besides that the Church of Rome is 
a true member of the Church of Christ."— Ibid. p. 208. On the other 
hand, Montague, Bishop of Chichester, assured Panzani that only three 
out of the whole bench of Bishops could be considered opposed to the 
scheme. — Panzani' 's Memoirs, p. 246. It is clear from Heylin's Life of 
Laud that the primate was favourably disposed towards it. See for further 
information on these negotiations an interesting essay on " 1636 and 1866," 
in Essays on Reunion, Hayes, 1867, and cf. infra, p. 121.] 



The English Reformation. 1 1 7 

the pretext that the Emperor Constantine had given all 
islands to the Pope, Adrian IV. had bestowed Ireland on 
Henry IL, king of England, At the time of the Wars 
of the Eoses the English rule over Ireland had again 
collapsed. The Popes had impressed on the Irish that 
their island was a papal fief over which they exercised 
supreme rights of suzerainty, and accordingly, when 
the English kings ceased to discharge the duties of 
vassals, Gregory xm. had sent an English theologian, 
Sanders, as his legate to Ireland, with Italian officers, 
and appointed an Irish general, Desmond, to rouse the 
inhabitants, who had been deprived of the exercise of 
Catholic worship without having become Protestants, 
and to lead them in a holy war against England. The 
enterprise failed, and at the death of Elizabeth in 1603 
Ireland was completely subjected to England. 

Then broke out the insurrection of 1642, and a mas- 
sacre followed in which several thousand Protestants 
were killed. A papal nuncio. Euniccini, came, and for 
some time acquired possession of supreme power. Ire- 
land was to be entirely separated from England, and 
annexed either to Spain or to some Italian principality 
under the suzerainty of the Pope. 1 Cromwell's con- 

1 Ranke, Eng. Gesch., Werke, vol. xvii. p. 26. 



1 1 8 Reunion of the Churches. 

quest of Ireland put an end to this scheme. At the 
Eestoration in 1660, a prospect was held out to the 
Irish Catholics of religious toleration and regaining 
their property, on condition of their taking an oath of 
allegiance to the King, and repudiating all right of the 
Pope to depose him or absolve his subjects from the 
duty of civil obedience. A similar declaration had 
been required of the English Catholics in 1647 by 
Parliament, on the motion of Lord Fairfax, as the con- 
dition of religious toleration. But Innocent x. had at 
once strictly forbidden them to accept any declaration 
of the kind, and excommunicated those who had already 
subscribed it. And now almost the whole property of 
Catholics and the social existence of the nobility was 
at stake in Ireland. But the papal nuncio at Brussels, 
and the Irish Bishops who were under him, condemned 
in accordance with papal teaching the " Bemonstrance," 
which 121 nobles had already signed. The theologians 
who drew it up, Walsh, Carew, and Coppinger, were 
persecuted and censured, and thus the fate of Ireland 
was sealed for centuries. This result was most grati- 
fying to the Cromwellian soldiers and English and 
Scotch adventurers, who had come into possession 
of the property through the war and confiscations. 



The English Reformation. i 1 9 

King Charles confirmed them in their possessions, and 
also confirmed the suppression of Catholic worship. 
The Catholic nobility of Ireland fell, the entire property 
passed into Protestant hands, and the mass of the 
Catholic population sank into an ignorant and barbar- 
ous proletariate. But the Pope's right to depose kings, 
annul oaths, and command rebellion, was preserved 
inviolate ! 

Elizabeth and her advisers had attempted to weld 
together in the edifice of their State Church foreign and 
mutually hostile elements, which were now sure to 
conflict with each other. The notion of two or more 
different Churches dwelling peacefully side by side was 
at that time hardly thought conceivable, and only 
admitted as a last resource, under pressure of extreme 
necessity. And therefore the national Church had to be 
made capacious enough to embrace and tolerate in its 
bosom the two opposite parties already existing in 
England, — the Calvinist and the Catholic. 

Calvinism, chiefly represented by the exiles who had 
returned from Switzerland after Mary's death, and 
forced their way into Church offices under Elizabeth, 
developed more and more into Puritanism from the end 
of the sixteenth century ; and the Puritans began to 



120 Reunion of the Churches. 

agitate for a new reformation of trie Church, on the 
principle of receding to the furthest possible distance 
from Catholic rites and forms. In opposition to this 
movement a Catholicizing school, appealing to the 
ancient Church, developed itself from about 1618 ; and 
through the favour of James i. and Charles L, who saw 
in a hierarchical organization and a strong episcopate 
a powerful support of the monarchy, the episcopal sees 
were filled with members of this school. The Laudian 
school, as it may be named after one of its most 
prominent representatives, the unfortunate Archbishop 
Laud, became, in the period between about 1620 and 
1670, the predecessor of the " Oxford " or " Ritualistic " 
school of to-day, and may be said to have formed a 
permanent unionist academy, although matters never 
advanced in England to the stage of regular negotiations, 
as was afterwards the case in Germany. In the writings 
of these men, Andrewes, Montague, Laud, Bramhall, 
Hammond, Thorndyke, and others, we meet with 
manifold expressions of a desire for reunion, and a 
hope of its accomplishment. It would be impossible 
to commend the unity of the Church more eloquently 
and emphatically than, e.g. Hammond has done, who 
regards it as the noblest gift of God, the grace above 



The English Reformation. 121 

all graces, the duty above all duties, the fulness of 
heavenly joy ; while he regards the Churches and 
religious parties of his own day as the palpitating and 
violently dismembered limbs of a living body, which 
present the most revolting and painful spectacle, as 
though torn asunder on the rack. And the complaint 
constantly recurs in the works of these writers, — " If 
only Eome would be less hard, and not lay on us 
burdens we cannot bear, and make demands which 
are intolerable." The English bishops told Panzani, 
who was sent as papal agent in 1634, that two parties 
were labouring to hinder the union of the English 
and Eoman Churches, viz., the Puritans and the 
Jesuits. 1 

But the bishops and theologians stood almost alone 
in the nation with their Catholic tendencies, so powerful 
had the Protestant spirit, in its crudest form, become 
in England through the influence of events, and so 
deeply had fear, horror, and hatred of everything 
connected with the Papacy sunk into the popular 
mind. The charge against Archbishop Laud, of having 
aimed at an union of the English Church with Eome, 
brought the primate of the Established Church to the 

1 [See above, p. 115, note.] 



122 Reunion of the Churches. 

block ; and it is worth remarking that his not having 
regarded the Pope as Antichrist formed one item in the 
indictment. It availed him nothing that he had 
declined the offer of a Cardinal's hat, and had written 
a learned work against the Papacy. 

The Episcopal Church, closely bound up with the 
monarchy, shared its fall, and Puritanism triumphed 
with its Calvinistic doctrine, its rejection of episcopacy, 
sacrifice, and priesthood, and its dislike of religious 
symbolism and liturgical worship. But it was soon 
weakened by internal dissensions, three great Puritan 
sects — the Presbyterians, Independents, and Baptists — 
mutually assailing one another, and with the fall of the 
Commonwealth after twelve years its dominion also 
came to an end. At the Eestoration, the Episcopal 
Church was re-established as well as the monarchy, 
and with the full approval of the nation, which was 
heartily sick of sectarian domination. In 1662 two 
thousand Puritan ministers suffered deprivation rather 
than submit to the ritual of the Episcopal Church, as 
enjoined by the Act of Uniformity, just as twelve years 
before many thousands of the Anglican clergy had 
resigned their benefices rather than accept the Puritan 
dogmas aud forms. What a contrast with the Catholic 



The English Reformation. 123 

clergy in Elizabeth's reign, when among 9400 not 200 
could be found to sacrifice their benefices rather than 
submit to the Protestant doctrine ! 

This was the sixth great change in the English 
Church since the beginning of the Beforniation, and 
thenceforth its continuity has not again been inter- 
rupted, however great the fluctuation of religious views 
was and is among its members. The greatest change 
of feeling was wrought by the four years' reign of 
James 11. He, having himself become a Catholic, did 
not wish, like his father and brother, to pave the way 
for a gradual union of the two Churches, but thought 
to subjugate all England to the Pope by treachery and 
violence, and to introduce the Jesuit type of Catholi- 
cism as the national religion — a scheme betraying a quite 
abnormal measure of blindness. For the English 
Catholics no longer formed even a hundredth part of the 
population, and no feeling was stronger among the over- 
whelming majority of the nation than hatred against 
the Pope and the papal Church. His policy led to the 
Eevolution of 1688. James was dethroned, and died a 
fugitive in France ; his descendants remained pretenders, 
and a German royal family, the house of Brunswick, 
mounted the English throne. But the result of this 



124 Reunion of the Chtcrches. 

danger and excitement, and of lively theological contro- 
versy with Catholic divines, was to give the Church a 
strong impetus in the Protestant direction. At the be- 
ginning of the eighteenth century, the only represen- 
tatives left of the earlier Catholicizing school were the 
Nonjurors, who had been thrust out of their dignities 
and benefices for refusing to acknowledge the new 
dynasty, and became extinct about the middle of the 
century. 

Under the pressure of a still severer penal code, 
and the dispiriting consciousness of being objects of 
universal suspicion, the English Catholics constantly 
diminished in number, and by 1780 they had shrunk 
to about 65,000 in all. But towards the end of the 
eighteenth, and increasingly since the beginning of the 
present century, followed the great immigration of 
Irish Catholics, purchased by an oath in which at length 
the deposing power of the Pope was openly and ex- 
pressly abjured, and in the very words of the formula 
of James I. It was taken by all the Bishops and Vicars- 
Apostolic, and Eome held her tongue. And if in our 
day the English Catholics number about a million, or a 
twentieth part of the nation, nine -tenths of them are of 
Irish descent. The first mitigation of the penal laws 



The English Reformation. 125 

took place in 1778, but so bitter was still the popular 
hatred, that in 1780 there was a great outbreak in 
London, roused by the well-known "No-Popery" cry„ 
(the Lord George Gordon riots), when Catholic chapels 
were destroyed, and the re-enactment of the penal laws 
was demanded of Parliament, though without success. 

As a condition of complete emancipation Pitt 
required and obtained (in 1760) from the Theological 
Faculties of the Sorbonne, Louvain, Douay, Valladolid, 
Salamanca, and Alcala, a declaration that the Pope has 
no civil authority in England, that he cannot absolve 
from the Oath of Allegiance, and that faith must be 
kept with heretics. 1 And when at last, in 1824, the 
time of full emancipation was approaching, and the 
recollection of Papal Bulls, insurrections, and con- 
spiracies of former times was found to be still the 
grand impediment to the bestowal of civil equality on 
Catholics, the English and Irish bishops issued solemn 
declarations to the effect that the Popes have not the 
slightest civil authority or any right to enforce religious 
duties by temporal means, such as corporal punish- 
ment and the like. This too Eome tolerated, for 

1 [The document is given at length in the Second Appendix to Sir John 
Cox Hippesley's Speech on a Petition of the Irish Roman Catholics, May 
18, 1810, 2d ed., London, 1810. Cf. Edinburgh Review, vol. xvii. 13 sqq.\ 



126 Reunion of the Churches. 

emancipation depended on it. And as it involved 
the rejection of the theory of Papal infallibility, it was 
stated in the English Catechisms that this pretended 
Catholic doctrine was a Protestant invention. 1 But 
the English and Irish bishops of this day do not hold 
themselves bound by the words of their predecessors, 

1 [In Keenan's Controversial Catechism, published by "the Catholic 
Publishing Company, New Bond Street," and largely circulated, especially 
in Ireland, the following Question and Answer occur, or did occur till 
a twelvemonth ago, at p. 112 : " Q. Must not Catholics believe the Pope 
in himself to be infallible? A. This is a Protestant invention; it is no 
article of the Catholic faith ; no decision of his can oblige under pain of 
heresy, unless it be received and enforced by the teaching body, that is, by 
the Bishops of the Church." As late as August 18/1 the Catechism was on 
sale in its original form in Dublin, but since then the leaf containing this 
passage has been cancelled and another substituted, in which this Question 
and Answer are omitted, and the book can only be obtained now in its 
expurgated form. As regards the testimony of the English and Irish 
Catholic bishops referred to in the text, the following important passage 
occurs in Bishop Clifford's objections to the infallibility decree, printed at 
Bome by authority during the Council in the Synopsis Analytica Observa- 
tionum (see Friedrich's Documenta Cone. Vat., vol. ii. p. 259) : — " Another 
great mischief is that before Catholics were liberated from the penal laws, 
and admitted to full liberty and civil equality with their fellow-citizens, 
bishops and theologians were publicly asked by Parliament whether the 
Catholics of England believed that the Pope could, without the express or 
implied assent of the Church, impose definitions in relation to faith or 
morals upon the people. All the bishops, among whom were two prede- 
cessors of his Eminence the Cardinal Archbishop of Dublin, and the 
theologians, answered that Catholics did not so believe. This appears in 
the printed papers of Parliament. In reliance on these answers the English 
Parliament admitted Catholics to participation in civil rights. Who will 
be able to persuade Protestants that Catholics have not violated honour 
and good faith, inasmuch as when the acquisition of civil rights was in ques- 
tion they publicly declared that the doctrine of Papal infallibility was no 
part of the Catholic faith, but as soon as they have gained what they 
wanted abandon their public profession of faith and assert the contrary ? "1 



The English Reformation. 127 

and regard the doctrine of the episcopate of 1826 as 
a doctrine condemned by the present Church. 

In outward form the position of the Episcopal 
Church in the present day is the same as in the last 
century. The Thirty-nine Articles and the Liturgy, 
which do not harmonize strictly with each other, still 
form the obligatory standard for its members ; it still 
retains undisputed possession of its rich endowments, 
and the majority of the nation still belong to it, — 
an overwhelming proportion of the upper classes and 
rural population, but not so many of the middle class 
in towns. But the Dissenting communities, weakened 
by the disappearance of the Presbyterians, 1 but rein- 
forced during the last hundred years by the numerous 
sect of Wesleyans or Methodists, are stronger and 
better organized in their common antagonism to the 
State Church than at any former period. It may still 
be said with truth that no Church is so national, so 
deeply rooted in popular affection, so bound up with 
the institutions and manners of the country, or so 
powerful in its influence on national character. During 

1 [The English Presbyterians have not disappeared altogether, though 
their numbers are diminished through the lapse of a large proportion into 
Socinianism. It was stated in the Eclectic Reviev) for February 1832 that 
out of 258 Presbyterian congregations in England 232 had become 
Unitarian. — See Letters to a Dissenter, Seeley, p. 106.] 



128 Reunion of the Churches. 

the last forty years it has extended its range, besides 
strengthening itself internally by the foundation of 
numerous colonial bishoprics in all quarters of the 
world. 1 It possesses a rich theological literature, 
inferior only to the German in extent and depth, and 
an excellent translation of the Bible, a masterpiece of 
style, and more accurate than the Lutheran ; and it has 
made the Bible a people's book all over England, so 
that one finds it even in the bedrooms of hotels. 
I believe we may credit one great superiority of 
England over other countries to the circumstance that 
there the Holy Scripture is found in every house, as is 
the case nowhere else in the world, and is, so to speak, 
the good genius of the place, the protecting spirit of the 
domestic hearth and family. I mean that no such 
literature of sin and shame as has poisoned the moral 
atmosphere of France, and is, alas ! circulated in a 
lesser degree in Germany, has yet found entrance into 
the British Isles. Another point of superiority is the 
observance of Sunday, which all Churches and parties 
have at heart, though it is not at present free from 

i [In the Calendar of the English Church for 1872 I find fifty colonial 
dioceses enumerated, in South and West Africa, North America, Australasia, 
China, India, the West Indies, Sandwich Islands, and Islands of the Western 
Pacific! 



The English Reformation. 129 

Judaizing exaggerations. But what I should estimate 
most highly is the fact that the cold, dull in- 
differentism, which on the Continent has spread like a 
deadly mildew over all degrees of society, has no place 
in the British Isles. To whatever extent scepticism 
may have advanced among the younger generation, on 
the whole the Englishman takes an active part in Church 
interests and questions, and that unnatural division 
and hostility between laity and clergy produced by 
ultramontanism in Catholic countries is quite unknown 
there ; so much so, that the influence of the prevalent 
manners has extended to English Catholics, and the 
relations of the laity to the priesthood among them 
are more intimate and confidential than anywhere 
else. What has been accomplished during the last 
thirty years by the energy and generosity of religious 
Englishmen, set in motion and guided by the Church, 
in the way of popular education and church building, 
far exceeds what has been done in any other country. 1 
Attendance at religious worship on Sunday is not, as in 
France, the exception but the rule with the higher and 
middle classes. The Church Congress at Nottingham in 

1 [The Calendar of the English Church for 1872 (Eivingtons) gives a list 
of ninety-six churches and chapels re-opened after restoration or recon- 
struction, and seventy-eight new ones built, during 1871 only.] 



130 Reunion of the Churches. 

October last (1871), in which sixteen bishops and some 
three thousand clergymen and laymen of the most 
various ranks and classes took part, presented an 
enviable spectacle to other nations. The weightiest 
religious questions of the day, and the special events 
and difficulties of the Anglican Church, were discussed 
with a dignity and thoroughness which suggests to 
every German the tacit inquiry whether anything of 
the kind would be possible with us. 

But there is no doubt a dark side to the picture, 
and three points will at once strike the eye of every 
observer. In the first place may be mentioned what 
is in England called Erastianism, — the heavy yoke 
of State supervision under which the English Church 
groans, a yoke it has indeed imposed on its own 
neck and daily confirms by the subscription of the 
Thirty-nine Articles. Eor this alone of all Churches 
in its confession of faith declares it to be a divinely 
revealed doctrine, that Councils cannot be held without 
the permission of secular princes, which implies the 
right of the State not to allow any authoritative 
declaration of doctrine without its own control and 
consent. 1 The King or Queen, now represented by 

1 [This is hardly accurate. The Thirty-nine Articles do not profess, like 



The English Reformation. 131 

the Privy Council, chiefly composed of laymen, is the 
Supreme Court of Appeal for all dogmatic or ritual 
questions. Its decisions in the two famous cases of 
Gorham and Denison * some years ago drove numbers 
of clergymen out of the Church, which seemed to them 
desecrated by this bondage. 

A second great evil is the religious neglect of the 
masses congregated in the great towns. The Church, 
with her existing machinery, cramped by the family 
ties of the clergy and the want of religious corporations, 
feels herself powerless in the presence of this constantly 
increasing heathenism ; and all the isolated attempts to 
meet the crisis have hitherto proved unavailing. 

But the greatest difficulty and most painful disease 
of the English Church is the internal rivalry and 
antagonism of parties and systems, and the harassing 

the Creeds, or dogmatic Canons of Councils, to deal only with, revealed 
doctrine, but to be a formula drawn up "for the avoiding of diversities of 
opinion " in the public teaching of the clergy, who are alone required to 
subscribe them. Moreover, the 21st Article is susceptible of a different 
interpretation from that given in the text. See Tract 90 (new ed., 
Eivingtons, 1865), p. 21, and cf. Bishop Forbes's Explanation of the 
Articles (J. Parker, 1867), pp. 293 sqq.] 

1 [This is a mistake. The Denison prosecution was quashed on technical 
grounds at an earlier stage, and never came, before the Privy Council at 
all on its merits. The question then raised, whether the doctrine of 
Transubstantiation or the "Keal Objective Presence," with its consequent 
doctrines of sacrifice and worship, can be lawfully taught in the Church of 
England, was ruled affirmatively by the Judicial Committee in the recent 
Bennett case.] 



132 Reunion of the Churches. 

uncertianty for clergy and laity which is its inevitable 
result. The divergence of views between different 
parties in this Church is greater than any which 
separates it from the Greek and Latin Churches, if the 
three are judged by their formal standards. Three 
great parties or schools are contending for mastery in 
the English Church, — the Evangelical or Low Church, 
the Broad Church, and the High Church or Anglo- 
Catholic. The first claims to inherit the Calvinist 
system, formerly naturalized in England, and to repre- 
sent the principles and doctrines of the pure Protestant- 
ism of the sixteenth century. These Evangelicals are 
wholly destitute of theological culture, and possess and 
produce only a popular, not a scientific literature. The 
old Calvinistic doctrine of justification is to them the 
Alpha and Omega of Christianity. In this party is 
especially concentrated the old traditional hatred of 
the Papacy, and the anti-papal interpretation of the 
Apocalypse is indispensable for tickling the ears of their 
hearers. They still exist on the credit of their greater 
and more active predecessors, and by help of the institu- 
tions they founded ; but they are not an advancing party, 
but the reverse. On the other hand, the Broad Church, 
as being the youngest school, are still in progress. 



The English Reformation. 133 

Created and sustained by the study of German philo- 
sophical and theological literature, they form an union 
of sympathizing scholars rather than a Church party, 
but exercise no inconsiderable influence on the views 
of educated lay society. As eclectics, they recognise in 
every large ecclesiastical body a mixture of truth and 
falsehood, good and evil, but consider the English 
Church the best relatively, on account of its combina- 
tion of Catholic and Protestant doctrines, and the great 
diversity of opinion cherished within its pale. They 
attach little importance to the form of Church-govern- 
ment, but all the more to the maintenance of the union 
of Church and State. 

The third, and from our point of view most important 
party, is that termed by its opponents the High Church 
or Eitualistic, and which calls itself the Anglo-Catholic. 
Its headquarters are at the University of Oxford, from 
which it derives its name. It repudiates the title of 
Protestant. It has been in process of development for 
forty years, and claims descent from the school of theo- 
logians of the seventeenth century, mentioned before, 
reaching from Andrewes to Bingham. It regards the 
Church as the divinely ordained organ and keeper of 
doctrine and the means of grace, and as standing or 



134 Reunion of the Churches. 

falling by the apostolical succession. And as this 
can only be found in the three great Churches 
whose continuity has never been interrupted, — the 
Western, Eastern, and English, — these three together 
make up the true universal Church ; their substantial 
agreement in matters essential to salvation not being 
prejudiced by various excrescences, abuses, and errors 
which may be found in them. The body of the Church, 
one in origin, has in course of time, through the sin of 
man and by Divine permission, become divided into 
three great branches — outwardly separated, but in- 
wardly united, — which, when the right time is come, 
will grow together again into one tree, overshadowing 
the world with its foliage. 

The Oxford or Anglo- Catholic school does not consider 
itself to be at issue with the doctrinal standards of the 
English Church. It maintains that by God's grace the 
Thirty-nine Articles, apart from the opinions of their 
authors, were so composed as to admit of an interpreta- 
tion in the sense of the ancient undivided Church, and 
are therefore capable of being subscribed by men hold- 
ing their views. And in fact three explanations of the 
Articles in a Catholic sense have already appeared, — one 
in the seventeenth century by the Catholic theologian, 



The English Reformation. 135 

Davenport (Sancta Clara); 1 another in 1841 by John 
Henry Newman, who has since become a Catholic ; and 
the last in 1867, by Forbes, Bishop of Brechin. 

It is chiefly from this section of the English Church 
that proposals and considerations on the subject of 
reunion emanate. Their most influential theologian, 
Pusey, has undertaken to show, in his last great work, 
the Eirenicon, how comparatively easy an union would 
be, inasmuch as the doctrines in which both Churches 
agree are so many. But that was all written before 
the notorious decrees of the Vatican Council, the bare 
possibility of which nobody then believed in. The 
bridge for corporate union has now been broken down. 

1 [Paraphrastica Expositio Articulorum Confessionis Anglicance, edited, 
with Introduction and Translation, by Eev. F. G-. Lee. Hayes, 1865. 
Christopher Davenport was born at Coventry about 1598, and matriculated 
at Merton College, Oxford, in 1613. He soon afterwards became a Eoman 
Catholic, and went first to Douay, and then to Ypres, where he entered 
the Franciscan Order, taking the name of Franciscus a S. Clara, in 1617. 
In 1639, on the re- establishment of the English Franciscan province, he 
returned to his native country, and was appointed chaplain to the Queen, 
Henrietta Maria. He was the author of several theological works, and after 
three times holding the office of Provincial of the Order in England, died at 
Somerset House in 1680. The Exposition of the Articles was published in . 
1616, and dedicated to Charles I. Of the Thirty-nine Articles, Sancta Clara 
considers eighteen Catholic throughout, and two (11 and 12) concerned 
with mere logomachies, while the rest require, but also admit of, explana- 
tion in whole or in part, and these last are examined at length, viz., 
Articles 6, 9, 13-15, 19-22, 24, 25, 28-32, 35-37. The work is supposed to 
have formed the basis of the famous Tract 90, to which Cardinal Wiseman 
refers in his Letter to Lord Shrewsbury, as containing " the demonstration 
that such interpretation may be given to the most difficult Articles as will 
strip them of all contradiction to the decrees of the Tridentine Synod."] 



LECTUEE VII. 

DIFFICULTIES AND GKOUNDS OF HOPE. 

" "XT^OU speak of a possible reunion of separated 
- 1 - Churches, while you are yourself obliged to 
admit that the largest of them, which is your own, has 
made union with her impossible by the decrees of July 
18, 1870." This is the objection before us, on which I 
proceed to remark as follows. 

Certainly no other Church will think of uniting with 
a body which assumes the right, never before claimed 
or heard of throughout the Christian world, of making 
new dogmas, and places this right at the absolute dis- 
posal of a single individual. -And for this reason, that in 
dealing with a Church so despotically constituted there 
cannot be any union, from the nature of the case, but 
only unconditional submission and renunciation of all 
knowledge and judgment of one's own. The notion of 
binding one's-self to accept articles of faith to be here- 

136 



Difficulties and Grounds of Hope. 137 

after fabricated and as yet unknown, contradicts the 
fundamental principles of Christianity. 1 

When a great change is to be carried through, 
a new doctrine introduced, and a great institution 
revolutionized, the first question to be asked is, which 
side the younger generation will take ? for to them 
belongs the future. We ask, therefore, whether our 
boys and youths will really become inoculated with 
the new doctrines, and make them, as directed, the basis 
of their faith, with which the whole edifice of Chris- 
tianity stands or falls ? Will they say, " My infallible 
master, my true lord and governor, to whom I am sub- 
ject, body and soul, is that Italian priest who is called 
the Pope " ? I think it impossible. It is inconceivable, 
because our whole education and training in Germany 
is an historical one, and every page of history convicts 
this system of spiritual absolutism of falsehood ; because, 
in the present condition and wide spread of historical 
knowledge in Germany, our youth will inevitably dis- 
cover that the new dogma of papal omnipotence is a 

1 [Accordingly, Archbishop Murray, of Dublin, when examined before a 
Parliamentary Committee in 1825 on the nature and extent of Papal pre- 
rogatives, and asked whether there had been any change in Catholic belief 
on the subject, replied, " With respect to faith there can be no change ; the 
faith of the Catholic Church we consider to be invariable."— Sessional 
Papers, 1825, vol. viii. p. 239 ] 



138 Reunion of the Churches. 

product of fraud and forgery, and a source of ruin for 
Churches as well as States. It is no longer possible to 
shut out our youth from knowledge, to keep them in 
ignorance of history. In that as in many other matters 
they are deceived at Eome. The Italian, Spanish, 
South American, and French bishops, who conformed 
to the Pope's will on July 18, possessed indeed not the 
slightest particle of historical culture ; but what was 
and is practicable in those countries, in the lamentable 
condition of their schools, is not possible in Germany. 
That circumstance alone must upset the calculations 
of the Vatican party, as far as Germany is concerned, 
for even the women and country folk, who are still 
reckoned upon, will be gradually and irresistibly drawn 
into the stream of knowledge emanating from the edu- 
cated classes, and carried along with it. Our young 
students will either put aside the articles of faith made 
yesterday, in the true conviction that they will be as 
foreign to the future as they are to the past belief of 
the Church, and will adhere to the ancient doctrine, 
or — God grant it be not the commoner result ! — on 
account of these untenable articles will reject the whole 
faith and abandon all religion. 

I may be further asked how I can venture to cherish 
and kindle in others hopes of reconciliation, when the 



Difficulties and Grounds of Hope. 1 39 

old, well proved and implacable enemies of ecclesiastical 
union — the men to whom any union, which is not an 
unconditional surrender, is an abomination — the Jesuits, 
are at present more numerous and influential in Ger- 
many than in any other country. Have they not 
their strong fortresses and intrenched camps in the very 
heart of our Empire ? Are they not already dominant 
in Westphalia and the Ehineland ? Do they not keep 
our bishops in complete dependence on them, and have 
not these last just held up the Jesuits to popular 
encouragement and veneration, as models of Christian 
wisdom and virtue ? Is it not they who pre-arranged 
the Vatican decrees, and thus, so to say, lent a hand to 
the Pope and the ultramontane bishops ? 

To this I reply as follows. I do not only believe 
but know that the reign of this Order in Germany 
will not be of long duration, that their brilliant victory 
— I mean especially the battles won on July 18 and 
August 31, 1870, 1 the Vatican decrees and surrender of 
the German bishops — will at no distant future be 
converted into a defeat. The clear testimony of history 
leaves no doubt about it. 

1 [The date of the second Fulda Pastoral, accepting the Vatican decrees. 
— Cf. Reinkens' Unterwerfung der deutschen Bisclwfe zu Fulda, Miinster, 
1871. It will be remembered that this Lecture was delivered in March 
last.] 



140 Reunion of the Churches. 

The experience of three centuries shows that the 
Jesuits have no lucky hand. No blessing ever rests on 
their undertakings. They build with unwearied assi- 
duity, but a storm comes and shatters the building, or a 
flood breaks in and washes it away, or the worm-eaten 
edifice falls to pieces in their hands. The Oriental 
proverb about the Turks may be applied to them : 
" Where the Turk sets his foot, grass never grows." 
Their missions in Paraguay, Japan, and among the wild 
North American tribes have long since gone to ruin. 
In Abyssinia they had once (in 1625) almost attained 
dominion, but soon afterwards (in 1634) the whole 
concern collapsed, and they never ventured to return 
there. What is left to-day of their laborious missions 
in the Levant, the Greek islands, Persia, the Crimea, 
and Egypt ? Scarcely a reminiscence of their former 
presence there is to be found on the spot. 

Above all has the Society of Jesus devoted its best 
services to its native home of Spain. Themselves 
children of the Spanish race and inheritors of the 
Spanish character, for sixty years they displayed their 
Spanish feeling throughout Europe ; they laboured for 
the spread and consolidation of the universal monarchy 
of Spain. The result was the bankruptcy and depopu- 



Difficulties and Grounds of Hope. 1 4 1 

lation of that once powerful kingdom, and its loss of one 
possession after another, so that by the end of the 
seventeenth century, to cite the language of a Spanish 
writer, it had become an inanimate corpse, the skeleton 
of a giant. In Spain itself they co-operated with the 
Inquisition for two hundred years in impressing their 
spirit on the life of the people, with this result, that the 
higher education has been crushed, the scientific spirit 
strangled, and the country, ruined in every department 
of life, is still behind every other country in Europe 
except Turkey, and, having no healthy literature of its 
own, has to feed on the foreign literature of France. 
Well might a Spanish diplomatist in Eome say, at the 
time of the suppression of the Order, "The Jesuits are 
the wood- worm that gnaws on our bowels." 1 

They it was who brought on the German nation the 
Thirty Years' War and its results, and to them Catholic 
Germany owes the decline of its schools and its conse- 
quent backwardness in cultivation and long intellectual 
sterility. It was they who completely undermined the 
ancient German and Catholic Empire, and paved the 
way for its fall. They, as the all-powerful conscience- 



1 " Quanto bien nos ha di venir de la expulsion de la carcoma que nos 
roea las entranas. "— Espiritu di Azara, p. 26. 



142 Reunion of the Churches. 

keepers of the Hapsburgs, Ferdinand l, Ferdinand 11., 
and Leopold I., have on their conscience the destruction 
of the liberties of the States of the Empire, the thorough 
enforcement of absolutism, the oppression and expulsion 
of the Protestants ; in a word, that whole crop of in- 
extinguishable hatred which the house of Hapsburg has 
sown throughout Protestant Germany. By their in- 
fluence that intellectual quarantine was established, by 
which the Austrian states have been entirely cut off 
from the rest of Germany, German culture kept at 
arm's length, and that exclusion of Austria brought 
about which we have lived to witness. 

Bohemia has long been given over to the care and 
charge of the Jesuits, and what have they made of it ? 
They have utterly destroyed the old Czech literature, 
and have brought matters to such a pass that nearly the 
whole Bohemian nobility is annihilated through execu- 
tions, confiscations, and banishment, three thousand 
families driven out of the country, and the Bohemian 
constitution broken up. And now the harvest of the 
dragon's teeth sown by the Order of Loyola is springing 
up, and if the contest of the two nationalities there 
admits of no peace or reconciliation, the acts of the 
seventeenth century and their authors must bear the 



Difficulties and Grounds of Hope. 143 

blame. The working of the Order in the ecclesiastical 
principalities may be exemplified from the condition of 
the electoral state of Cologne, as recently described by 
Perthes. There for nearly two centuries everything was 
subject to their influence and direction, as confessors 
of the Electors. 

In England the destiny of the Catholics was for a 
century moulded by the influence of the Jesuits at 
Rome and the intense hatred which they excited at 
home, and we have seen what a monstrous weight of 
misfortune and oppression they rolled down on the 
shoulders of their hapless co-religionists. 

They tried to reintroduce Catholicism into Sweden 
by means of a liturgy forcibly imposed on the clergy, 
and with the help of King Sigismund, who was under 
their guidance ; Sigismund in consequence lost his 
crown, and they were banished for ever from the- 
country. 1 

In Russia they undertook, by means of their instru- 
ment, the false Demetrius, to establish Polish influence, 
and bring the Empire and nation into subjection to the 
See of Eome, but their proselyte and jprotfye was 
killed, and they had to quit the country. In Poland 

1 Gejer's Geschichte Schwedens* 



144 Reunion of the Churches. 

they dominated the kings, the higher clergy, and the 
nobility for a long time ; and Poland is destroyed. 

In Portugal they had King Sebastian entirely in 
their hands, and he lost his army and his life in Africa, 
in a foolish campaign suggested by religious enthusiasm, 
and plunged his country into an abyss of misery and 
ruin, from which it has never been able to rise to its 
former prosperity. Then they did their best to promote 
the Spanish dominion over Portugal, and that also soon 
collapsed. And when they again became powerful 
through having the Sovereigns under their spiritual 
direction, the country sank into a decline, from which it 
is still suffering, through their intolerable misgovern- 
ment. 

In France the Jesuits were the conscience -keepers of 
the Bourbons, and their spiritual children, Louis xiv. 
and Louis XV., paved the way for the Eevolution and 
the destruction of the dynasty, or rather, one may say, 
made it inevitable. For the deep decay of the country, 
the neglect of the greater part of the nation, and the 
profligacy spreading from the Court, impressed on the 
first acts of the Eevolution the destructive character 
which has to this day hindered the recovery of France. 
And here too we must say of the French Church, that 



Difficulties and Grounds of Hope. 145 

it was the Jesuits who, during the time they ruled it 
by means of the royal patronage, so devastated and 
demoralized it, that even in the eighteenth century it 
was powerless to cope with Voltairianism, and was 
already falling to pieces before it was finally over- 
thrown by the Eevolution. 

I readily leave to this Order the fate of the Vatican 
decrees, the more readily as it has the duties of pater- 
nity to discharge towards them. For the Jesuits 
excogitated, sketched out, and finally shaped those 
decrees, though with the assistance of certain Bishops. 

And now I turn to the friends of our cause, those who 
have before me borne their testimony to it, and those 
on whose co-operation or sympathy we may reckon. 

There are three works of recent date occupied with 
the question of the union of the Churches, all of 
which have fed my hopes and raised my courage ; for 
they prove that alike in Germany and in England the 
number of the friends of union is by no means small, 
and is still increasing. The author of Fax Vdbiscum 1 
is an influential clergyman in Franconia. He paints 
in glaring colours the great and almost insuperable 

1 Pax Vdbiscum. Die kirchliche Wiedervereinigung der Katholiken und 
Protestanten historish-pragmatisch beleuchtet von einem Protestanten. 
Bamberg, 1863. 

K 



146 Reunion of the Churches, 

difficulties which beset every step on the road to 
reunion. There does not seem to him either the capa- 
city or the call to accomplish the blessed work at the 
present time, but the way should be prepared for it, 
and every impediment, as far as possible, got rid of. 1 
Nor does he conceal that the contest for dear life which 
both Churches will have to carry on, against the giant 
powers of unbelief and destruction which are rising 
up against them, can only be waged successfully with 
their forces united. 

The second work, by the Berlin preacher Schulze, 
goes so far in the approval and acceptance of Catholic 
doctrines that one may almost say that, if it expressed 
the mind of a preponderating majority in the German 
Protestant Church, four-fifths of the difficult work of 
reunion would be already accomplished. 2 Nor does the 
work stand alone, as is shown by the fact that the 
Evangelische Kirchenzeitung of Berlin for 1870 has 
communicated and indorsed its contents. 

The third work, by Dr. Pusey, the views of which 
are substantially shared by thousands of the clergy 
and laity of the Anglican Church, goes further still than 

1 Pax Vobiscum, p. 342. 

2 Ueber romanisirende Tendenzen, ein Wort zum Frieden. Berlin, 1870. 



Difficulties and Grounds of Hope. \/\rj 

Schulze's, for the famous Oxford theologian thinks that 
all the doctrinal decisions of Trent might be accepted, 
if only certain decrees were authoritatively explained 
in the sense of the more moderate Catholic divines. 1 
Only the extension of the papal primacy to an un- 
limited supremacy, and the excesses in Marian worship, 
and in the veneration of Saints and sacred pictures, 
are, in the author's eyes, the great stumbling-blocks 
that must first be removed. 

"We constantly hear complaints now of a general 
hostility to the Church. There is said to be a wide- 
spread feeling of alienation and dislike towards her, 
variously and injuriously manifested in the press and 
in society. That such complaints should be made on 
the Catholic side is perfectly intelligible. The party 
now dominant in the Church is warlike and aggressive, 
and constantly proclaims that it is striving for two 
great objects. 2 In the first place, it is resolved to rule 
and subjugate everything, not only in the sphere of 



1 An Eirenicon. By Rev. E. B. Pusey, D.D. Rivingtons, 1865. Cf. First 
Letter to Very Rev. J. H. Newman, D.D., 1869, and Is Healthful Reunion 
impossible? a Second Letter, etc., 1870. 

2 [Compare Newman's description of the action of this same ' ' insolent 
and aggressive faction," in his letter to Bishop Ullathome, published in 
the Standard of April 7, 1870. It is quoted in full at pp. 355 sqq. of 
Letters of Quirinus. Rivingtons, 1870.] 



148 Reunion of the Churches. 

religious but of moral and even political and civil life. 
In the next place, it is resolved to undermine, and, 
when the right moment arrives, to destroy the existing 
public order of society and modern legislation, with the 
liberty of the press, of religion, of teaching, etc. ; for 
with these things — appealing as it does to the principles 
of the Syllabus and the views of the Popes — it cannot 
reconcile itself. But with the Protestant Church it 
is different. Its clergy, allowing of course for some 
exceptions, can neither be charged with lust of power 
nor with hostility to the present order of society. And 
here I am reminded of the strong saying uttered at a 
Church meeting : " We have no flocks at our back ; 
ninety-nine hundredths of our people are in league 
with the enemy." 1 How is this phenomenon to be 
explained? And how is one to explain another cog- 
nate phenomenon, which I will describe in the words 
used by a distinguished Protestant divine, Bruckner, 
in an address delivered at Leipsic in 1860: "Our 
Church, notwithstanding all remaining differences, is 
in many respects reverting to the condition of the age 
before Constantine. Public opinion is again, on the 
whole, enlisted, not on the side of Christianity, but 

1 Messner's JVeue Evang. Kirchenzeitung, 1866, p. 6. 



Difficulties and Grounds of Hope. 149 

against it," etc. ; and lie anticipates oppression and 
sufferings for Lis Church. 1 

Here it is obvious that mere naked unbelief or 
hostility to positive religion will not explain the 
phenomenon ; the mischief lies deeper. The general 
superintendent aud Court preacher at Berlin, Hoff- 
mann, has lately written on the " Causes of the 
antagonism to the Church in Germany." 2 He enumer- 
ates many, but above all the uncertainty and dis- 
cordance of the doctrines delivered from the pulpit. 
The impression left ou one's mind is, that the evil 
lies in the want of confidence and respect of the laity 
for their preacher, in whom they see a man teaching 
simply according to the measure of his attainments, 
and from his own subjective point of view. They 
have no feeling that he is supported on the broad 
stream of Christian tradition flowing down through 
eighteen centuries, and that his message is but the 
echo of the voice of the whole Church reaching up to 
Christ ; that they do but hear from his mouth what 
has been always and everywhere proclaimed in the 
name of the Lord. If then the German Protestant 

1 Die Kirche nach ihr. Ursprung, Geschichte, Gegenwart, Vortrage, von 
Luthardt, Kahnis und Bruckner. Leipsic, 1865, 

2 See his periodical, Deutschland, Jahrg. i. pp. 224 sqq. 



150 Reunion of the Churches. 

Church was enlarged by union with other Churches, 
and re-entered by this union with the ancient Churches 
into their unbroken continuity of Church life and 
doctrine, would she not gain in strength and authority ? 
Would not her testimony be weightier and her power 
of popular attraction increased ? 

If we look closer, we shall be able to assume a dis- 
position and readiness for union among all those who 
admit that the communion they belong to is not abso- 
lutely the Church, the one and single Church complete 
in itself, but only a branch Church, which cannot claim 
to be itself that One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church 
whereof the Creed speaks. This is maintained by those 
divines who adhere most strictly to the Lutheran 
doctrine. 1 They, as well as most Protestant theologians 
at the present day, say that there is no communion of 
which it can be affirmed that the fulness of the gifts 
of grace and spiritual life dwell exclusively within its 
pale, while all without is apostasy and heresy. 2 It 
follows that they must hold the one Catholic Church 
to be now split into fragments, each of the great 
Churches having, of course in different degrees, its 

1 So Harnack, Die Kirche, ihr Amt, ihr Regiment, Niirnberg, 1862, pp. 
87 sqq. 

2 Cf. Stahl, Die lutherische Kirche und die Union, p. 450. 



Difficulties and Grounds of Hope. 151 

peculiar advantages and defects. But it also follows 
that no single Church can claim Catholicity to the ex- 
clusion of the rest. The Greek and Eussian Churches 
do not do so. Mouravieff observes that the Councils 
held in the East by Greek and Eussian Bishops had 
abstained from calling themselves " GEcumenical/' be- 
cause the Greek Church cannot regard herself as the 
universal Church apart from the Eoman. 1 

And here I will refer to a doctrinal ruling of Catholic 
theology, which is admitted even by the most papally- 
minded theologians, and which as I believe may be of 
the greatest service for the cause of union. It is 
always taught in the Church that baptism is what 
makes every one a member of the true Catholic Church, 
and as baptism can never be obliterated or repeated, 
anybody once baptized remains for ever a member of 
the One Church, even should he pass over to another 
sect or Church, only that he then loses the rights of 
membership. In the religious manual approved by 
Church authority for use in the Bavarian schools, it is 

1 Question Religieuse aV Orient et d' Occident (Moscow, 1856), pp. 223. 
[Similarly the Popes who summoned the Councils of Lyons and Florence 
for the reunion of the Greeks, Gregory x. and Eugenius iv., speak through- 
out in their official documents of "the union of the Western and Eastern 
Church," of " uniting the Church of God," etc. See, for the detailed 
evidence of this, Ffoulkes's Christendom's Divisions, pp. 259-261, 337-340.] 



152 Reunion of the Churches. . . 

taught that those who have been made members of 
Christ by the sacrament of baptism, if they remain out 
of her visible communion only through involuntary 
ignorance and error, are regarded by the Church as her 
true children erring by no fault of their own. 

And here it must be explained that the notion of 
involuntary error is a very wide one, for it includes all 
who cannot be charged with obstinacy (pertinacia) 
and conscious rejection of recognised truth. Conse- 
quently the great majority of Protestants are members 
of the One Catholic Church. Of the eighty million 
Greeks and Eussians this is self-evident. So broad is 
the notion of Catholicity, and thus disappears what else 
would be offensive and odious in the maxim, " Out of 
the Church no salvation." Certainly Pius vm. in his 
Brief of March 25, 1830, addressed to the Ehenish 
Bishops, has again enjoined on them the teaching of 
this doctrine in the harshest sense, and without the 
addition of any mitigating or explanatory interpretation, 
and that with direct reference to the Protestants. 1 But 
Pius ix. has not thought himself bound by this judg- 
ment, and declares in an Allocution of December 9, 
1854, not only, first, that ignorance is an excuse before 

1 Denziger, Eincheiridion Synib. et Defin., 1854, p. 423. 



Difficulties and Grounds of Hope. 1 5 3 

God, but, secondly, that "no one can undertake to fix 
the limits of this ignorance, when regard is had to the 
diversity of peoples, countries, and minds, and the influ- 
ence of many other circumstances." The Pope therefore 
teaches, or must by logical inference teach and inculcate, 
" Judge not that ye be not judged ; condemn no one who 
is in error according to your opinion, for you cannot tell 
whether his error is inculpable or not." That the pre- 
valent practice in the Eoman Catholic Church and the 
conduct of many of her priests is in glaring contradic- 
tion to these theories, is perfectly true. If Popes and 
Bishops wished to be consistent, they would be obliged 
to acknowledge that the Church is obscured and her 
visible evidence and attractive power lessened by the 
gross abuses prevalent, the amount of superstitions 
favoured and practised, and the spectacle of so many 
scandals among the clergy, and that this excuses before 
God the judgment of those who refuse the invitation to 
enter her communion. But this doctrine of the Church 
being partly visible and partly invisible does us excellent 
service, first, in disposing of the old controversy between 
Catholic and Protestant theologians about the visibility 
or invisibility of the Church ; and secondly, because it 
enables us to say to all members of other communions, 



154 Reunion of the Churches. 

" As being baptized, we are all on either side brothers 
and sisters in Christ, we are all at bottom members of 
the universal Church. In this great garden of God let 
us shake hands with one another over the confessional 
hedges, and let us break them down so as to be able to 
embrace one another altogether. These hedges are the 
doctrinal divisions, about which either we or you are 
in error ; if you are wrong, we do not hold you morally 
culpable, for your education, surroundings, knowledge, 
and training make your adhering to these doctrines 
excusable, and even right. Let us examine, compare, 
and investigate the matter together, and we shall dis- 
cover the precious pearl of religious peace and Church 
unity, and then join our hands and forces in cleansing 
and cultivating the garden of the Lord, which is over- 
grown with weeds/' 

The doctrine of conversion and justification is still 
regarded in many quarters as the most important point 
of difference. It was, men say, the turning-point of the 
German Eeformation, its fairest jewel and speciality, 
the article of a standing or falling Church. The words 
of the Elector of Brandenberg are often cited, who 
impressed above all on the consciences of his theolo- 
gians, when setting off for a conference with their 



Difficulties and Grounds of Hope. 155 

opponents, to bring back with them the little word 
" sola," i.e. the doctrine that man is justified by faith 
M alone." And in fact this doctrine formed the prin- 
cipal subject of the public discussions at diets and 
religious conferences, as at Eatisbon in 1541 and 1546. 
But I must confess, at the risk of manifold contradictions, 
that this is just the point where reconciliation seems to 
me most easily attainable. On one side are ranged the 
whole Western Catholic Church, the whole Greek and 
Eussian Church, and the greater part of the Anglican 
Church ; all these adhere to the ancient doctrine. 
The Protestant doctrine, as it is most clearly taught in 
the two Formularies of Concord and the Catechism of 
Heidelberg, is no doubt absolutely irreconcilable with 
the doctrine of the other Churches. The contradiction 
is so glaring and decisive, that, were the Protestant 
doctrine adhered to, all hope of reunion must be given 
up. But happily this is not the case ; the overwhelming 
majority of German Protestant divines, and especially 
those who make Scripture exegesis their speciality, only 
differ in their manner of expression, and not in sub- 
stance, from the ancient doctrine. 1 

1 [See, for some illustrations of this, my Catholic Doctrine of the Atone- 
ment, pp. 281-284.} 



156 Reunion of the Churches, 

The celibacy of the clergy can form no ground of 
separation, for this reason, if for no other, that even 
the Eoman Church does not regard it as a divine law, 
but only as an ecclesiastical ordinance, and does not 
therefore hesitate to hold communion with the married 
clergy of the Eastern Church. And, on the other hand, 
Protestants, remembering certain exhortations of St. 
Paul, ought to allow that it well befits the Church to 
have a class of ministers who voluntarily renounce 
family life, in order to devote themselves exclusively to 
the service of the flock, and to offer to that body of 
the laity who, in these days, are compelled by poverty 
or their station in life to remain unmarried, an example 
of continence which might else be represented as im- 
possible. 

So again with communion in both kinds. The 
withdrawal of the chalice in Western Christendom has 
caused unspeakable mischief, and led to divisions and 
wars ; nor have I been able to discover any important 
benefit resulting from it. The whole Eastern and 
Eussian Church, Uniate as well as Orthodox, adminis- 
ters communion under both species ; and at all events 
those Churches which are willing to unite ought not 
to be rejected on that account. 



Difficulties and Grounds of Hope. 157 

As regards the doctrine of the intermediate state, it 
is clear how both Churches might gain by comparing 
and coming to an understanding on their points of 
difference. Protestant theologians complain that the 
popular notion of two states only after death — heaven 
and hell, immediate beatitude or damnation, — and the 
consequent disuse of prayer for the departed, "has 
brought the people to the brink of doubt about eternal 
life altogether." 1 They acknowledge that belief in an 
intermediate state of cleansing ought to be received, and 
prayer for the dead recommended, even for the sake of 
the living, and indeed ought to be formally reintroduced. 2 
On the other hand, the Latin Church, by uniting with 
the Eastern, has allowed the scholastic opinion of a 
material fire in Purgatory as the means of chastisement 
to drop ; 3 and the substance of the doctrine can cause 
no further offence, if once the gross abuses and mis- 
apprehensions are removed, which have incrusted its 
kernel in practice and popular belief. 

1 Neumann in the Zeitschrift fur luther. Theologie, 1852, p. 282. 

2 So Karsten and F. W. Schulze. [The testimony of two other eminent 
Lutheran divines, Martensen and Kothe, are cited to the same effect in my 
Catholic Doctrine of the Atonement (2d ed., W. H. Allen), pp. 282, 284, 
and the list might easily be enlarged. For a catena of Anglican authorities 
in favour of prayer for the dead — which might be indefinitely lengthened 
by reference to living writers — see ch. xi. of Christian Doctrine of Prayer 
for the Departed, by Eev. F. G. Lee. Strahan, 1872.] 

3 [Cf. supra, p. 51.] 



158 Reunion of the Churches. 

As regards confession, it is enough to remember that 
the need for some institution securing to the clergyman 
the opportunity of acting directly on the conscience of 
the individual Christian is keenly felt in every Church. 
In the Anglican Church, confession, in the strict sense 
of the word, has been largely practised for some years. 
In the German Protestant Church, as far as I can 
gather from its literature, there is a very widely spread 
desire to replace the general confession, which has be- 
come unmeaning and mechanical, by something much 
more like the Catholic form. 

Then again, the Sacrifice of the Eucharist, and the 
necessity or fitness of making it the centre of public 
worship, as in the ancient Churches, has in our day 
found zealous advocates among German Protestant 
theologians. On the other hand, the Catholic theo- 
logians will not deny that the use of the living and 
universally understood language of the people is 
preferable to the dead Latin, which only fosters the 
popular fancy of some occult sacredness and magical 
power residing in unintelligible forms. 1 

Among the points in which the Churches have come 

1 [In the North of Germany it is very common at High Mass to sing 
vernacular paraphrases of the Eyrie, Gloria, Credo, etc., in which the 
people join, instead of the Latin ; and authorized forms are published 
for this purpose in many dioceses.] 



Difficulties and Grounds of Hope. 159 

nearer than before must be reckoned the monastic insti- 
tute. It is allowed by Protestants that " only by such 
corporations can the wants be satisfied, which always 
make themselves imperatively felt in the Christian 
community j" 1 and in fact the Protestant deaconesses 
correspond to the Sisters of Mercy in the Catholic 
Church. 2 And we may recognise an unmistakeable 
approximation and removal of old causes of offence in 
the circumstance that in the Catholic Church the 
female orders and convents, designed exclusively for a 
life of prayer and contemplation without active work, 
have disappeared, or are in course of disappearing ; while 
the communities devoted to the bodily and spiritual 
good of others, the care of the sick and education, 
display a power and activity hitherto unknown. 

We must make up our minds to en countering 
numberless adversaries. Three classes especially will 
set themselves to oppose our eirenic efforts, — the first 
numerous and powerful in England and America, the 
second in Germany, the third everywhere. First 
come all those who recognise in the Pope the fulfil- 

1 Kothe's Ethik, vol. iii. p. 424. 

2 [The Calendar of the English Church for 1 872 gives between forty and 
fifty Anglican sisterhoods or convents, discharging various works of mercy, 
corporal and spiritual ; some of them having several daughter houses in 
different localities.] 



1 60 Reunion of the Churches. 

nient of the scriptural prophecies about the great enemy 
of Christ and the Apostasy, and consequently think no 
further reformation of the papal Church possible, but 
look for its judgment and destruction. Secondly, there 
are those theologians to whom the ancient doctrines 
common to all Christian Churches are already a burden 
and offence, of which they are anxious to rid them- 
selves. The third hostile army, and its name is 
legion, consists of those encamped under the papal and 
Jesuit banner. That no stone will be left unturned by 
that party to hinder every approximation, and strangle 
at its birth every idea of peace, is certain. The Vatican 
Council was organized for the express purpose of making 
all plans of reunion for ever impossible. Individual 
conversions, indeed, are gladly welcomed ; they are 
drops at once absorbed and lost in the ocean of Eoman 
uniformity. But there is to be no negotiation on a 
larger scale, for bodies of men meeting on equal terms. 
Some years ago a society was formed in England of 
Anglicans and Catholics combined for the common 
furtherance of the union of the Christian Churches, 
and it was condemned by the Pope, at the instance 
of Archbishop Manning. 1 

1 [The " Association for the Promotion of the Unity of Christendom " by 



Difficulties and Grounds of Hope. 1 6 r 

At the beginning, then, of any eirenic movement, its 
opponents will outnumber its friends and helpers. But 
we may count on the sympathy, if not the active help, 
of those who have at heart the greatness and unity of 
Germany, and who believe that the political union is but 
half the work and requires an ecclesiastical union of all 
its tribes as the completion, fulfilment, and crowning of 
the edifice. In Germany the two religions are con- 
stantly becoming more intermingled, and the artificial 
devices for keeping them apart are more and more felt 
to be disturbing and hindering influences, superseded by 
the movement and needs of the present, and are being 
gradually put aside. It seemed, after the controversy on 
the subject at Cologne in 1839 and the following years, 
as if marriages between Catholics and Protestants would 
become more infrequent, but they have increased of 
late years, and will certainly continue to increase. And 
these multiplying marriages and families of mixed 



intercessory prayer, founded Sept. 8, 1857, and condemned by a decree of 
the Roman Inquisition, Sept. 16, 1864, first published in England by 
Archbishop Manning, shortly after bis appointment to the See of West- 
minster, in a Pastoral dated Epiphany 1866. The official report, published 
by the Secretary of the Association in Sept. 1868, gives the total number 
of members as 12,684, including "Roman Catholics, 1881; Orientals, 
685 ; members of miscellaneous Protestant communities, 92 ; of Church of 
England, 10,026." — See Union Preview, vol. vii. p. 74.] 



1 62 Reunion of the Churches. 

religion are already paving the way for the fusion of 
the Churches, and encourage us not to lose heart. The 
mixture and interpenetration of the adherents of the 
two confessions advances unchecked. There are no 
longer any towns, and there will in time be no villages, 
where Catholics and Protestants are not dwelling 
side by side. But that mutual tolerance and respect 
which depends on the forms of refined social intercourse 
is confined to the higher and educated classes. Among 
the lower classes and the country population the 
intermixture of confessions must either lead to a coarse 
unbelieving indifferentism, or beget the desire and 
need for a Church union, which may put an end to 
those interminable religious troubles, frictions, and 
asperities. 

I have found it the almost universal conviction in 
foreign countries that it is the special mission of 
Germany to take the lead in this world-wide question, 
and give to the movement its form, measure, and 
direction. We are the heart of Europe, richer in 
theologians than all other lands ; and the linguistic 
knowledge indispensable for this task exists with us 
in a higher degree than anywhere else. What can, 
what ought to be done ? A negotiation between the 



Difficulties and Grounds of Hope. 163 

Churches through plenipotentiaries accredited on either 
side promises no result ; the mere proposal or attempt 
would now, after July 18, 1870, be a folly. The right 
instruments would be found in men, both of the clergy 
and laity, who would unite for common action, first in 
Germany, untrammelled by instructions, and simply 
following their own mind and judgment. They would 
soon draw others to them in rapidly increasing 
numbers, by the magnetic power of a work so pure and 
pleasing to God, and would thus be brought into com- 
munication with like-minded men in other countries. 
The basis of their consultations would be Holy Scrip- 
ture, with the three oecumenical Creeds, interpreted 
by the still undivided Church of the early centuries. 
Thus would an international society of the noblest and 
most beneficial kind be formed, and what began as a 
snowball might well become an irresistible avalanche. 
There would be no lack of cold contempt or furious 
hostility to the work; but they would fail to over- 
throw it. 

A Prussian official, who had long been concerned 
with the ecclesiastical affairs of both Confessions, wrote 
thus at the end of his public career in 1857 : — " I am 
certain the time will come, before the newly inserted 



164 Reunion of the Churches. 

stones are mouldered, when a common Te Deum will 
be sung in the cathedral of Cologne." 1 

In this belief and hope I desire to live and die. 
Nor could I wish for any better success and reward of 
my Lectures than this ; that my hearers should make 
a like hope part of their life, carry it into their dealings 
with members of other communions, and, wherever an 
opportunity occurs of bearing witness to it, not remain 
cold and dumb. We Germans have lived to see days 
of serious import and joyful triumph, — days of 
victory and of national unity at length attained ; and 
I trust that our people will remain strong enough and 
moral enough to maintain the lofty position divine 
Providence has assigned to them. But these days of 
triumph have had to be dearly bought with terrible 
sacrifices, and at the cost of rivers of human blood. 
Here, in the sphere of religion and in the effort for 
religious peace, a fairer crown and bloodless victory 
awaits the German people, — more difficult indeed to 
win than that victory over France, for it is the con- 
quest of ourselves, our indolence, our pride, our selfish- 
ness, our prejudices, our easy self-conceit. But if we 
are willing to march to this contest, we march under a 

1 Eilers, Meine Wanderung durch Leben (Leipsic, 1857), vol. ii. p. 265. 



Difficulties and Grounds of Hope. 165 

Leader whose name may inspire the most faint- 
hearted with courage. It is He from whom descends 
every good and perfect gift, whose word is not yet 
fulfilled, but must be fulfilled in time to come : " There 
shall be one fold and one Shepherd." 



PRINTED BY T. AND A. CONSTABLE, PRINTERS TO HER MAJESTY, 
AT THE EDINBURGH UNIVERSITY PRESS. 



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